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Which radio station serves as a emergency alert system for los angeles and the IE?
- Thread starter 30james
- Start date
All radio stations have to carry emergency alerts, but if you're asking which stations are the primary stations that other radio stations monitor for emergency alerts, those are defined by each state's EAS plan.
EAS plans are developed by the states and then approved by the FCC.
California's EAS plan lists KFI (640), KNX (1070), and KBIG (104.3) as the LP-1 (primary) EAS stations for Los Angeles. KFI and KNX are also both "Primary Entry Point" stations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System#Primary_Entry_Point_stations) for southern California.
The Inland Empire has four different EAS zones, with KFRG (95.1) as the primary for Zone 1 (Riverside & San Bernadino), KDES for Zone 2 (Coachella / Palm Springs), KRXV/KHWY/KHYZ for Zone 3 (Mojave), and KZXY for Zone 4 (Victor Valley) The full Riverside - San Bernadino EAS plan (and EAS plans for other CA counties) are at: Cal OES | Office of Emergency Management
You should note that there was no EAS alert for the SoCal Northridge earthquake in 1994. There was no need as the event was over and there was nothing that alerts could do to warn or prepare people.
If my recollection is right about 9/11 (I was in a world of confusion as I was on a plane when it happened), there was no EAS alert then, either.
EAS alerts prepare people for hazardous conditions like tornado and hurricane warnings, evacuation notices for floods, chemical spills and fires and the like.
Remember that the stations themselves are relays. The lead stations can't start an alert, it has to be a government authority either local, state or national, who starts the process. The stations just relay the information.
This is where we get to Minot, ND, as a case study. A chemical spill from a derailed train endangered the city. Clear Channel had several local stations on the air, and not one of them carried an EAS alert. So some blamed the stations and consolidation. The fact was that an EAS alert had to be started by government authorities and they were badly trained and prepared and did not apparently know how to activate the system which would have "seized" the local stations and put the alert on the air.
Anybody remember CONELRAD? When I was a little kid, they used to say during tests "in the event of an emergency tune to either 640 or 1240 kcs on your dial for instructions" or something to that effect. I remember that a lot of our radios had little triangles marking those dial positions.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Incidentally, that system caused no end of headaches for radio station engineers, because even a test of the system usually meant having to switch frequencies on the transmitter and feed a tower whose height was not ideal for the non-usual frequency of the station.
Not only that, the final stage of the transmitter was not adjusted for the different frequency, and the mis-tuning stressed the transmitter even when operated at very, very low power.
I once did a DX test of my station HCRM in Quito, licensed to 570 but where I used 565 so DXers could easily catch the station on an empty frequency. Just that tiny change in channel made the final tubes (2 x 4-400A) glow white-red so I only wanted to do the test for 60 minutes at most.
Imagine moving from 1540 or 1580 in LA down to 1240! Back then, most transmitters could not do very low power easily so it was a tough thing to do.
For those unfamiliar, the system rotated between many stations with no single one being on for long to avoid enemy direction finders "zooming in" on it.
At https://worldradiohistory.com/Modern_Era_Collection.htm about 2/3 down the page there are a bunch of CONELRAD publications. I also have audio files of a CONELRAD test alert.
Although it never happened, I remember reading in Popular Science or some other magazine that the govt was planning to build a whole bunch of 640 and 1240 facilities all over the country to be used in case of an emergency such as a nuclear attack.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
That was one of the engineering difficulties I was alluding to, David. Your actual experience in Ecuador makes the point well.
And if you have ever heard the recordings of the actual Conelrad tests, the audio quality is terrible, due to the fact that all broadcasts were only on those two frequencies which, of course interfered with each other in a monumental way.
Generally, the CONELRAD audio was fed on phone lines. That was where the audio quality suffered.
CONELRAD systems ran at very low power, both on purpose to avoid missile homing and because transmitters when moved off their tuned channel could not run at anything but a tiny percentage of their rated power.
And CONELRAD used rotating transmitters in each city and area, with none on the air more than a few minutes at a time. Because of this and the low power and the fact that all tests were done in the daytime, there was little co-channel interference. In fact, in many rural areas you simply could not hear either CONELRAD signal... but since the fear was attacks on urban areas, that was considered acceptable.
I actually heard three of the CONELRAD test live. They sounded like a phone line from the late 50's/early 60's.
Here's a video of a CONELRAD alert receiver. It detects the sequence of the station's carrier being dropped and then coming back in 5 second intervals and triggers an alarm. Otherwise it's just a ruggedly-built, rack-mount vacuum tube AM radio.
Back when I work at KIUL 1240 Garden City KS, they were in (co owned) newspaper building that had a "wing" where the radio station was located. The manager told me that the "government" paid for studio in the basement when Harris built the addition. I know one time when I was there I considered using it when there was a really too close tornado.
When I was the transmitter tech at KCBS(AM) back in the late 1980s our Continental 10 Kw backup transmitter still had a 640 KHz Conelrad crystal in it's second oscillator slot. We went down for maintenance every Sunday morning from 2 AM - 5 AM so one night I briefly fired it up on 640 to see what would happen. It wasn't happy at all, at peak tuning it made about 6 Kw into the broadband dummy load but only 1.2 Kw into the directional antenna. Since we did not have a non-DA mode at that time who knows where the DA sent the power.
I was 10 years old and living in San Rafael (about 15 miles from the KCBS transmitter) when Conelrad was activated during the Cuban Missle Crisis. I remember not being able to hear anything on 1240 and 640 was barely audible on my All American 5 AM radio. Don't know if 640 was coming from KCBS while I was listening or from another station in the rotation.
I was 10 years old and living in San Rafael (about 15 miles from the KCBS transmitter) when Conelrad was activated during the Cuban Missle Crisis. I remember not being able to hear anything on 1240 and 640 was barely audible on my All American 5 AM radio. Don't know if 640 was coming from KCBS while I was listening or from another station in the rotation.
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There was no Conelrad activation in October 1962 in Los Angeles as far as my fading memory recalls
I believe the last national CONELRAD test was in 1962. All AMs either did the alternating trick on 640 or 1240 or signed off and all FMs were silent.
CONELRAD was never "activated" except as a test.
"Other than for routine testing, CONELRAD was never activated. The closest it came to implementation was during the height of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. As the Cold War confrontation escalated toward its peak, the U.S. Strategic Air Command initiated DEFCON II (Code Red) status at 10:00 PM, Friday, 26 October. This remains the highest DEFCON threat level ever officially confirmed to date. Nuclear armed interceptors and bombers were either on airborne alert or staged at fifteen-minute readiness status."
Forgotten American Cold War Artifact: CONELRAD
by James Kraus In 1951, the U.S. government initiated the CONELRAD (CONtrol of ELectromagnetic RADiation) system in an effort to prevent the possibility of incoming Russian bombers using transmitti…
autouniversum.wordpress.com
J
JoeLouis
Guest
I always wondered about CONELRAD, what if there was no 640 or 1240 station in your area back then, did a new station magically appear on those frequencies? I'm sure KFI at 640 had L.A. covered, but what about other areas with the lower powered 1240? or no station at all.
Transmitters in that era were built or retrofitted with an auxiliary crystal and first RF stage on either 640 or 1240 along with a control circuit to reduce the power dramatically since running a transmitter and tower off its tuned frequency could either burn out the tubes or cause a failure of some other kind
Clear into the 70s some of the old CONELRAD telco lines were still active. Caused some issues for us trying to clean up program lines when taps were still hung on it to other stations transmitters.
Growing up in Florida and being in elementary school when the Cuban missile crisis was going on and being across the bay from MacDill AFB we probably would have been burnt toast right off the bat if the missiles started flying. I definitely remember duck-and-cover drill three days a week while that was going on. I do remember it snowed in December of that year and the teacher wouldn't let us go out and play in it because she was sure it was radioactive fallout from "something that the commies did". Even at that young age, I was an avid radio listener and I never heard the Conelrad tones go off and the radio was on a LOT every day...and believe me, we had to know where every fallout shelter was on the walk to and from school. I can still remember where they were to this day and doing a Google Earth search shows that they're all gone.
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