K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
May I politely ask how many more times we will go down a siding to television from the main track about AM radio?
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Saving AM Radio
- Thread starter BruceB
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I think there might be some inadvertent mental converging of media types.
I recall listening in on a call out research example where the interviewer asked an obvious senior if she knew what radio stations she listened to regularly.
The participant answered: 'Oh, I listen to Channel 4, sometimes Channel 9, and I really like the evening news on Channel 5.' The interviewer tried correcting by saying; I meant, what radio stations do you listen to? The panelist answered: 'I just told you what radio stations I listen to... '
Uh....yeah.
I recall listening in on a call out research example where the interviewer asked an obvious senior if she knew what radio stations she listened to regularly.
The participant answered: 'Oh, I listen to Channel 4, sometimes Channel 9, and I really like the evening news on Channel 5.' The interviewer tried correcting by saying; I meant, what radio stations do you listen to? The panelist answered: 'I just told you what radio stations I listen to... '
Uh....yeah.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I wonder if they also watched their radio.
Like a hawk
'And sometimes I stay up late and listen to that Jimmy Kimmel on my radio.'
They loved listening to Larry King, but the feeling wasn’t Mutual!
Next hundred? Maybe next 20 at the most. Probably more like next 10 for 25% of AM stations.
I’m gonna say next 5-10 years for the smaller market stations without translators.
In that particular case, sure. In a different case, in California, the train derails from a large quake, one that also knocks out almost all the cellular and cable. The toxic plume is coming, but you don't know that because so many first responders are busy doing Northridge Meadows Apartments stuff that there's no manpower to bullhorn every street in your dense suburbia. Only when a neighbor with a battery radio or a generator that powered his OTA TV got an EAS alert and started knocking on doors like yours did you know that.
Why would this theoretical dispatcher be untrained, or forget how to activate it, or forget the codes, but be trained how to calmly and accurately input 911 calls from hysterical people, know how to activate his 200 channel P25 county voice dispatch console, and not forget all his APCO and state/local penal/H&S codes? Why would someone who doesn't flub where he sends ambulances all day for heart attacks and strokes flub one EAS activation?
You're arguing people trained to be capable of a swath of very technical tasks under sometimes extreme pressure suddenly become daft or are just left to drift untrained when confronted with a comparatively simple task.
Well, you said most disasters are complete surprises that catch EMS services off guard, and asked me if I thought a train derailment when it happens is expected. That sounded like you were saying EAS shouldn't even be bothered with if it couldn't do magic like predicting the future -- even though it can for people downwind of disasters like a derailment. That's why I asked if you thought a functionally equivalent scenario, like ShakeAlert being unable to forewarn people at a quake epicenter, but only those miles away, made it unworthy of being bothered with too. You said EAS was outdated, outmoded, and unreliable and shouldn't be relied on during immediate crises. I read that as you saying its meaningless. And meaningless things get scrapped -- which is why this thread about AM radio got started, actually.
By that do you mean an OES employee coincidentally named Les Nessman?
Because I've been clear all along that all I'm interested in is EAS being augmented with an infinity live interrupt mode to improve emergency information dissemination in automated markets where people would actually turn on radios after discovering failures of other communication venues. So I couldn't have been implying an expectation of anyone standing by at automated stations, named Les or otherwise.No, that I haven't. When you characterize those people as impossible to EAS-train or unable to remember that training, I have no frame of reference for understanding why that is.
I said right above in my words you quoted that I thought the sirens were for wildfires too, because the AP said they're for "a variety of dangers including wars, volcanoes, hurricanes and wildfires." Yes, simple sirens that only make siren sounds can't be used for multiple emergency types or people won't know what to do when they sound, so no, I wasn't arguing with you there. But the AP article's wording told me Hawaii's sirens must be the voice PA variety. And if they are, then they can tell people "a firestorm is coming, go toward the ocean immediately." And there I see no no eeenie, meenie, miney, or mo.
There's nobody extra to hire and pay if an existing OES faculty person gets the role. It doesn't have to be a pro voice actor impersonating Boss jocks through Aphex Big Bottoms. All the position would need is someone who can speak clearly and monologue talking points about the information he/she has been collecting as it has continued to develop and evolve. I'm not clear why you're focusing again and again on there being a need for writing and prepariing scripts. I know there's is a basic framework for how to intro/outro the wording of short EAS alerts in most areas. But for the long-form (hours long) broadcasts I proposed when I first brought EAS up, all that listeners would care about are raw facts, not the ornateness of their presentation style.
Where I live, people have kits because of earthquakes. Every time the ground so much as thumps, the local news breaks into programming and takes calls from viewers relating their experiences while showing social media videos of scattering cats, falling crap breaking, and swimming pools sloshing. After that, all the CalTech experts like Lucy Jones begin their live press conferences and ultimately their mantras about preparedness, having earthquake kits, portable radios, flashlights, canned food, stored water, ad nauseam. There are also PSAs. People here actually fear these things and many prepare.
There are also the midwestern states that suffer tornadoes, and the many states in the south and all along the east coast that end up under two feet of water with all their stuff blown down by hurricanes. At DSL Reports right now people are talking about a massive routing chokepoint on the old Time-Warner network getting nailed by a Helene-spawned tornado, causing major outages in Spectrum's internet in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio.
Here are the earthquakes, the tornados, and the hurricanes. And from only the first page of Amazon's search results for "emergency radio," here are only the models selling over 1,000 units per month:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015QIC1PW/ - AM/FM/NOAA - "2K+ bought in past month"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FKYHTWP/ - AM/FM/NOAA - "8K+ bought in past month"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08T1FB7J3/ - AM/FM/SW/NOAA - "3K+ bought in past month"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MFCFKG5/ - AM/FM/NOAA - "3K+ bought in past month"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B9H9JWCJ/ - AM/FM/NOAA - "3K+ bought in past month"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B018I4BPNU/ - AM/FM/NOAA - "1K+ bought in past month"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083TLZN7G/ - AM/FM/NOAA - "3K+ bought in past month"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TSH7ZN5/ - AM/FM/NOAA - "3K+ bought in past month"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C57ZVV24/ - AM/FM/NOAA - "1K+ bought in past month"
That's 27,000 x 12 months = 324,000 units per year, sold by one store. So, yeah, unless you live in a place like northeastern Minnesota, I wasn't kidding.
Incidentally, if by your fetal position comment you were referring to zoomers and younger millennials GPFing the moments their phones stop telling them how to walk and chew gum at the same time, on that we have zero argument. But separate from them, there's still everybody else.
I've never met this Kirk fellow. But if that means you think this encounter will never end in a consensus, you could be right. I haven't wanted to lock horns with you. But it's becoming clear we see this too differently and that it's maybe better to agree to disagree.
That sounds fairly reasonable. Those AMs with translators in smaller markets where a lower powered FM gives adequate coverage will likely survive. But the stand-alones generally will be gone.
There are a lot of smaller markets that could support an AM... even a high-band low power daytimer... in the era before big box stores and onlie business destroyed much of local business. So stations in such markets have lost most of their local revenue base, and will disappear.
That is exactly what happened in the famous Minot incident. The people on duty well after midnight were familiar with how to dispatch emergency workers or to alert police, because they were doing the same thing for less sizable events, often every day. But they never had to activate the EAS for a broken water main or a brush fire or an overturned garbage truck.
There is a precise EAS procedure. But not being something anyone in Minot had done... ever... it was unfamiliar and not top' of mind.
The people in Minot had, apparently, not been well enough trained and were simply incapable of activating the EAS. They did not even react by finding someone who could step in and activate the system
The point here is that in Minot the activation of EAS was warranted. But there is no such thing as "EAS Services" any more than the police department has a special Jay Walking Service that just handles that particular infraction. EAS is part of a plethora of things that the authorities handle, and such an activation is so uncommon that, even with adequate training, people don't remember to do it; if they do remember, they don't remember how and don't remember where the manual got stored.
EAS depends on local people for local emergencies. There can be high turnover in positions that require knowing what to do, and there can be people who trained some time ago who just don't remember or who, under stress, don't even remember EAS. There are no city and county and state "EAS Commander" officials. EAS is a function of broader government positions.
As Kelly said, there is too much human element and not much of a double-check system.
EAS "automatically" seizes all radio stations and TV stations and the like. When activated, there is nothing stations themselves have to do as the EAS system takes over until the EAS official says the event or message is complete.By that do you mean an OES employee coincidentally named Les Nessman?
As I said, the need for EAS activation may never happen in the entire career of some people in the position to call for activation. They have no practice... just some manuals and maybe a seminar they took 5 years ago as part of a broader training refresher for their position.
There is no such person. There is, in a whole state, a whole hierarchy of people in different city, country and state departments who have the authority to act. Some may be in law enforcement, some in health services, some in emergency services and others in government administrative positions.
But there is no "Oklahoma State EAS Commander". There are hundreds of people, from local law enforcing and government to the governor who can intervene. But none of those people is an employee of a radio station, a TV or cable outlet or cellular phone company.
You are assuming that there is a centralized, 24/7 staffed EAS department in any state. Because situations that warrant EAS activation can be the domain of various different branches of government, there are many parallel entities at all levels of local, county, state, regional and national government.
Nobody I know, 12 miles from the San Andreas fault, has an earthquake kit.
We have one of those military type plastic crates with two radios (One battery, one solar/crank operated), water purification materials, dried food for two weeks, basic first aid, some tools to break open jammed doors, etc. But nobody we know or have known for 30 years has that.
As to your data on "emergency radios" keep in mind that most of those are also used just to listen to something. Most are, in fact, not sold for emergency preparedness but for working in the garage, while gardening, when at the pool or camping or on a picnic.
I lived the prior near-three generations in Puerto Rico. Our hurricane preparedness kit was a case of beer and a couple of bags of Doritos. If the hurricane was going to be major, maybe we got some batteries while we picked up a couple of bottles of Don Q.
Because it's the amount of use and practice. Most EMS services hardly ever touch their EAS encoders, people forget how to use them. The codes aren't updated, power supplies go bad without knowing, staff change and aren't trained on it's use. Pretty simple actually.
Because EMS are dispatched regularly, EAS is rarely if ever activated. See my first response.
I've already explained how this works. Coming up with scenarios based on your personal perception to fit your narrative isn't relevant to the real world.
You read it wrong. EAS has it's use that seems to work, like alerts from NWS. Thinking that local activation in a emergeny is very effective is not based on any practical reality in modern life and after many years of EAS being in place.
I've never claimed that either EAS nor AM radio should be scrapped. What I have said many times, is the marketplace has, and will ultimately decide AM;s fate. Assuming that EAS is, or could be used in modern times for alerting the general public, or that radio stations are tasked with activating EAS, isn't reality in a smartphone society.
Blah, blah. I never said some OES employee is named Les Nessman. There have been several folks on this site that like you, seem to think radio has a Les Nessman-like staffer waiting for a disaster to jump on the air and save the day. Again, not a current reality.By that do you mean an OES employee coincidentally named Les Nessman?
I didn't say anything was impossible. What I was pointing out (yet again), is in a smartphone world, EMS want to reach the public where they are. They aren't listening to radio as their primary form of news and information. Trying to reaquaint someone with how to activate EAS, let alone potentially broadcasting information that isn't relevant to everyone, is a waste of EMS time. Most municipalities know more about their preparedness and how to handle a situation than you do. Leave that to the professionals.
Yeah, we can agree to disagree.
However, I feel the need to point out that the fact that you seem to believe many citizens today have emergency kits, crank-up, or battery powered radios, etc., is indicative of a lack of understanding of not only how modern society functions, or that you're possibly a time traveler from 1960's who ended up being dropped into 2024.
Oh, and Radio Discussions doesn't pay by the word, so your long volumonous responses are doing nothing but occupying precious time that you'll never get back.
Great responses David. I think YeOlde's evil plan is just to just wear desent down with pure word count by ultimately saying the same thing over and over.
You summarized this well.
Both your post and mine detailed the reality of the fact that there is a whole hierarch of EAS "responsible persons" who likely were trained long ago and have forgotten the procedures because they never actually did it. The system depends on humans who likely never had to think about EAS activations ever before, and the system is dependent on those people to work.
This is like the serialized Charles Dickens stories. Dickens was paid by the word, but was very entertaining. This has become boring and tedious and is too much like sailing into the wind to keep me engaged much further.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
@DavidEduardo @K.M. Richards I agree. This thread is becoming very tedious and unproductive, and though the EAS discussion has been interesting and informative, perhaps it should be continued in it's own thread.
Time to be locked maybe?
c
Time to be locked maybe?
c
Yeah, it's going off topic
Another thread in this forum discussed royalties for artists (singers, performers, instrumentalists) versus for composers and authors or for publishers and record companies.
An additional royalty could put a batch of stations out of business and off the air. Which stations are in the batch would depend on the nature of the fee, for example a fee related to the station's listenership or coverage or income versus related to the popularity of the various songs.
Just a few years ago I had tuned in to a "listener supported" station. One of their spots solicitating contributions mentioned a (proposed?) $40,000 annual fee for the ASCAP, etc. licenses. (Another mentioned a $40,000 annual rent payment for the land with the tower and transmitter building.) The station was "small" like a daytimer under a kilowatt.
An additional royalty could put a batch of stations out of business and off the air. Which stations are in the batch would depend on the nature of the fee, for example a fee related to the station's listenership or coverage or income versus related to the popularity of the various songs.
Just a few years ago I had tuned in to a "listener supported" station. One of their spots solicitating contributions mentioned a (proposed?) $40,000 annual fee for the ASCAP, etc. licenses. (Another mentioned a $40,000 annual rent payment for the land with the tower and transmitter building.) The station was "small" like a daytimer under a kilowatt.