The counter down at the bottom of the pages will reach zero today. Today is the day of the long anticipated “national test” of the Emergency Alert System, to actually test the ability of the White House to quickly take control of every radio, TV and cable outlet at once in order to inform Americans of essential National Security information.
This is really on “Open Book Test”. Every radio and TV engineer has known the test is coming for months. Owners and Management know exactly when it is supposed to happen – they’ll be hovering over the engineers to make immediate decisions.
That’s not how emergencies work in real life. A train derails in the middle of the night in Minot, North Dakota, 4 airplanes are hijacked and flown into buildings at the same time. There is confusion, people are not immediately available to make decisions, people don’t know what to do, information is fragmented and often just plain wrong. Passing along wrong information can cause more damage than doing nothing.
It’s time to end the charade and pull the plug on national EAS. It’s only real purpose (like the bomb shelter under the Greenbriar Hotel) was to reassure people that it was possible to win or at least survive a nuclear war. The only purpose of the EAS is to give the FCC the tool to bludgeon radio stations that someone influential at the NAB wants out of business for not having a functioning EAS device or logging the tests.
Anyone paying attention knows that when an event happens now (like a major earthquake), the entire world knows about it within seconds because of Twitter and Facebook. The generals at the FCC are refighting their grandfather’s war.
However, I think there is zero chance the FCC or DHS will do anything but use the test to justify more rules, more control and more government spending. Government cultivates the State of Fear. It’s what gives them power.
Back in the good old days of Larry King on Mutual Radio, he had a caller (not me) who would try to get on the air and play audio of the “bee-deep” tones that would drop automated stations into commercial breaks.
Tom Taylor sort just dropped the hint that if anyone records the EAS test, they could subsequently trigger a national EAS alert just by replaying the audio.
“in band” signaling is so 1970s. None of this should be done “in band” in the audio.
Come on – you miss old Cora Rubenstien closing out the show with, “The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day…..”
FDR (intentionally) got it wrong. The only thing we really have to fear is – government.
Well, well, another tool in the FCC and FEMA’s belts to play with, I hope its only silence we hear for a minute or 3 minutes that the test is supposed to last for, I would hate to venture this could lead to the White House being an excuse to disable free speech if they felt the need or want, for selected opposing political gains, or testing on the spur of the moment in a losing debate.
Apparently over the weekend, they cut it back to 60 or 30 seconds.
I’m curious to see whose voice we hear.
well it screwed up on one of my local NPR stations. The tone started about 30 seconds past 2, the automated voice began “This test is a ….” and then dead silence followed by popping/static noises. After 30 seconds the final tone sounded and regular programming resumed.
I saw the test. It was fuzzy, barely audible audio and only a 30-60 second test that came about two minutes late. I did not recognize the voice– but it wasn’t President Obama’s.
If this is what we’re depending on to warn the nation, we’re screwed. I agree, drop this charade. The U.S. government should not have the authority to hijack virtually every broadcaster in America, especially if that’s the only level of quality they’re able to achieve.
There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong ….
The problem with the current EAS design is it relies on relaying the signal over the air. The messages began at a “Primary Entry Point” one of about 30 radio stations around the country (almost all AM radio stations), and was retransmitted from station to station. Each extra “hop” adds in additional loss of signal quality, like if you dub a recording over and over on a recorder that hasn’t had the heads cleaned in about 20 years. I suspect some stations were set to not grant immediate access and instead taped the message for later playback – which meant that any downstream stations that relied on that station also had their messages delayed.
As evidenced by the 2/3 of the stations now streaming, very few radio stations don’t have broadband Internet access. If this thing needs to exist at all, it should be done using multicast media over the internet.
I was listening to WELI-AM “over the air”, and had KFI-AM on its stream. Having my portable AM radio fairly close to the computer sort of botched the experience – but what I thought I heard was a bunch of extraneous noise – like people had their microphones open along the relay path and then it started feeding back with the delay systems repeating the message.
The voice sounded like a non-descript radio voice – nobody I recognize. A key part of this test needed to be that the “message” was actually read using the device in the White House that would be used (the exact microphone in the actual room). My sense was it was a pretaped message fed directly into the system by pressing a button.
I think the PEPs are directly connected to the central EAS command center via dedicated phone lines. In the event of some catastrophy like a nuclear exchange or an EMP weapon, it’s pretty optimistic to think those phone lines would remain functioning.
Back when I was doing some work for Chrysler (1988ish), they were looking over their phone bills and noticed they were still paying for a whole network of teletype machines that at one time were used to send messages out to the factories. Nobody at the factories knew where they were or if they even existed any more.
New countdown timer – the time remaining until the Congressional SuperCommittee runs out of time.
they did that test yesterday, I was traveling across Virginia. All I heard was “The Twilight Zone ” theme.
I didn’t check XM, did anyone else?
“-Stupor-Committee” what in heck do they think can change or get done, with John Kerry and that Dingus patty murry from Oregon on the committee ?
you keep the same dorks we get the same results.
Did the nuclear war break out today? I wasn’t paying attention…
Yes. We’re all dead and this is all just a dream. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.
I wish Beck and Limbaugh had made an effort to find out about the national EAS system before asserting an opinion based on their extensive experience logging State EAS tests.
The national EAS network uses an entirely different set of relay stations. More often than not, state EAS systems have the state’s capital as the center of the network, and messages spread outward.
The only state EAS warnings you’re likely to have ever heard other than the test is alerts from the National Weather Service about tornados or flash flood warnings.
National EAS is done by a hierarchical network that originates at FEMA, hands the message to Primary Entry Point stations which then activate next level station’s that then activate lower level stations. Since the strongest FM stations maybe can reach 50 miles, they don’t work well as EAS hubs.
The national EAS does not piggyback on state EAS systems and just activate the state EAS in all 58 states – and there may have been the problem. I recorded the EAS test from KFI and its clear that it had overlapping tests. I think what happened was the national EAS started and everyone came to attention… So the station that is the State relay in California came on the air for the national alert – so KFI’s equipment was receiving both the real national EAS test and an “echo” of it coming via its state EAS network on a 7 or 10 second delay. So the message was completely garbled. It is similar to what happened on WELI in Connecticut.
This is an extremely basic flaw – the national EAS predates the state networks – which in most states are organized by the state’s NAB association. You would think the people at the companies that make the EAS gear would have realized the same alert would arrive via two paths and one should have been ignored.
It was a mistake to cut the test from 3 minutes to 30 seconds. There is no telling how much more recursion of overlapping EAS systems would have resulted. It may well be that it would have been impossible to turn it off as the message kept echoing and reactivating the network over and over.
I guess they will try the test again, in the near future ? Lets go back to the
Emergency Broadcast System : )
Next year was the guess. After they “fix” all the problems
One tiny quirk that caused a little confusion – the FCC still uses the antiquated latitude and longitude coordinates from 100 years ago – DHS probably doesn’t know that. The difference can be maybe as much as 500 feet depending on the part of the country. Of course, if the “big one” hits California, then it will be more wrong 🙂
Let me get this straight… it (EAS) relies on an initial set of 30 AM stations to propagate a daisy-chained signal?
Umm, how will it work after 2 or 3 preemptive EMP’s (nukes) are detonated a few hundred miles in space?
As I recall, the whole point of DARPA’s creation of the internet was to be able to withstand such a scenario…
Instead of EAS/EBS, we might be better off with the old manual relay system and air-raid sirens of yore.
Yes, that’s correct.
The Primary Entry Points are the first relay point. But let me reassure you – they aren’t just ordinary radio stations. To be a PEP, you must have equipment at the transmitter capable of originating local messages, 24 hour a day staffing of the EAS equipment and something like a week’s supply of oil for your backup generator, and a food supply so that the person buried in the underground studio at the transmitter can survive during the nuclear fallout to keep people informed what to do. (remember the WKRP episode where there is a bomb threat and they have to broadcast from the transmitter – that’s actually pretty much what AM radio stations look like)
WLW-AM in New Orleans is one such station When Hrricane Katrina hit and there was a massive power outage, the backup generators failed almost immediately – the fuel to run them had not been freshened in years and was nothing but oil sludge.
Should WLW become activated as a PEP for real, the transmitter is set up to broadcast at 500,000 watts, assuming it has power.