National EAS Test Failures

Fieldtech1 said:

Why not use OTA DTV as the relay cascading network. You could slice off an encrypted PID that radiostations could monitor for EAS messages. I imagine this could be implemented fairly easy with already existing systems.

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Don't think that's a good idea. For starters, I'm thinking of how long my OTA DTV receiver takes to relock after a lightning strike. Flaky reception in the urban jungle is another issue...look how hard it is to get AM's downtown.

boiseengineer said:

NPR gets its PEP feed off-air from WBAL.

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Not anymore, they now have direct feed and appropriate encoder/decoder.

Best regards,

w/

That's good! Been outa' the loop for a while.

Sadly, the conference bridge arrangement FEMA set up is the reason things went way wrong including the feed NPR re-transmitted. It was poorly thought out. Shame on FEMA. I'm guessing we would have had about 85 percent of the nation covered properly with nearly perfect alerts if it wasn't for THIER goof up. Let's make sure the Congress critters know that WE did things right for the most part in this test. FEMA dropped the ball hard.

Next time they aught to call over to the SBE and see if they can find some people that have a clue how to distribute audio and set levels.

It just was a bad idea. It was when the nukes may have been on their way any minute, but with the 24/7 news cycle it'd be ll over the air and social media way before this daisy chain ever got activated. Most if not all emergencies are local or at most regionl; even if North Korea managed to lob a nuke it would only affect the West Coast at least initially (radiation could reach the whole country, eventually, I get that, but that's still a local emergency. Now supposedly we're supposed to spend another 100 million that we don't have to see what went wrong (when qualified engineers already know).?

The EAS works reasonably well locally; let's leave it at that.

If the Enforcement Bureau likes to gig stations that don't send an EOM after a RMT (didn't that happen last spring at a non-comm?), then they need to pay a visit to FEMA and issue a big fat NAL to them for inserting a second set of headers in the middle of a EAN. They should treat everyone the same.

Fieldtech1 said:

Why not use OTA DTV as the relay cascading network. You could slice off an encrypted PID that radiostations could monitor for EAS messages. I imagine this could be implemented fairly easy with already existing systems.

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Because OTA digital transmission systems are just too darn "brittle" to be dependable in the many scenarios which emerge.

Really, let's just bury some redundant coax and be done with it.

If only Rube Goldberg were alive to draw the proper cartoon for this system....

OKCRadioGuy said:

Sadly, the conference bridge arrangement FEMA set up is the reason things went way wrong including the feed NPR re-transmitted. It was poorly thought out........FEMA dropped the ball hard.

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I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard it from an AFCCE member that says this is reliable: According to my unnamed source, the reason that the double print audio message went out was not due to an equipment failure. It was because FEMA had speakers set up to monitor the test in the same room as the mic for the announcement. The open mic picked up the delayed broadcast and viola! instant acoustic feedback. If true, it was an amazingly dumb thing to do.

I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard it from an AFCCE member that says this is reliable: According to my unnamed source, the reason that the double print audio message went out was not due to an equipment failure. It was because FEMA had speakers set up to monitor the test in the same room as the mic for the announcement. The open mic picked up the delayed broadcast and viola! instant acoustic feedback. If true, it was an amazingly dumb thing to do.

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Wrong. The second header had "WCCO" as the originator. They were the source of the double alert.

boiseengineer said:

Wrong. The second header had "WCCO" as the originator. They were the source of the double alert.

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Of course, this is hearsay, so it's very possible that it's wrong, but what I understood was that FEMA had open speakers monitoring some of the PEP feeds, including WCCO. Evidently, they had a conferencing hybrid bridge operating, but it was overloaded with all of the open speakers and it failed to null out WCCO's speaker, so it was picked up by the mic and rebroadcast. I can't think of any other good reason why WCCO's header and audio ended up in New York, other than the mix happened at FEMA. If true, it was a dangerous setup. The monitoring should have been done in a different room.

Regardless of what may or may not have happened, this will end up being the fault of George Bush and that EVIL Dick Cheney

Wouldn't Facebook and Twitter work better? Mandate that all stations have Facebook accounts...

Bill Wolfenbarger said:

Wouldn't Facebook and Twitter work better? Mandate that all stations have Facebook accounts...

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Might work for tests.
But, in a real emergency, millions of people will be on-line, sending funny "Bend over and kiss......" videos. So, nothing else will get through.

TomZ said:

And this begs the question: what will 0bama do?

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Blame it on the lack of spectrum, due to broadcasters "hogging" it all ;D .

WNTIRadio said:

An HF link?! How DUMB is that?!?! Again, this was cool in 1955. At least make it some form of DRM HF link so what comes out on the other end doesn't sound like a guy on CB channel 6.

"This is a test... AUUUUUUUDIOOOOOOOO... mud duck..... 10-4... [whistle]... AUUUUDIOOOOOOO"

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They could send it as a Digital signal...old geezer Hams do it all the time.
HF is not an "antiquated mode". It's still the most reliable system we have for long-distance communications.
Every EOC has HF equipment.