It happens to all of us. It happened again today. 11:45 Tuesday morning, CBS 11 transmits EAS alert "EARTHQUAKE WARNING for Tarrant County [Ft.Worth] Texas". The scroll rolled on and on for about 3 minutes. 12:25 Tuesday afternoon, CBS 11 transmits "Technical errors mistakenly sent EAS alert for Tarrant County.....disreguard". It happens to television engineers too. Come on in, the water's fine.
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CBS 11 [DFW]
- Thread starter Texas Gentleman
- Start date
thunderradio said:Nope . Glitch occured as KTVT was switching a freq. for better coverage after the recent HD conversion. AN "electronic burp" happened ,thus the earthquake warning. How in the world can you warn about an impending earthquake? Maybe the spirit of Charlton Heston can clues us in from his Movie in 1974(with SENSUROUND).
Electronic blurp? Can you enlighten us further? EAS equipment checks for validation time stamps when forwarding a message. Now if an absentminded engineer manually generated the alert, I could understand it happening.
thunderradio said:Nope . Glitch occured as KTVT was switching a freq. for better coverage after the recent HD conversion. AN "electronic burp" happened ,thus the earthquake warning. How in the world can you warn about an impending earthquake? Maybe the spirit of Charlton Heston can clues us in from his Movie in 1974(with SENSUROUND).
it is difficult to see a connection between transmitter work and inadvertent triggering of an EAS event, especially *this* EAS event. (there *is* always Murphy's Law, but...)
Some boxes have provisions for single-button activation of a Required Weekly Test. I suppose it's possible some boxes (I'm not familiar with all of them) can be configured to trigger *any* valid alert from a single contact closure. But given the frequency of earthquakes in North Texas (not!) it's hard to imagine KTVT would have programmed an Earthquake Warning to a hot-key/GPI closure.
I would be pretty confident someone, somewhere intentionally loaded an Earthquake Warning into their EAS box, probably for testing purposes, and forgot to patch out the box before running the test. And not necessarily at KTVT. It could have happened at one of the EAS Local Primaries, at the NWS, or at one of the local emergency agencies with the authority to issue EAS alerts.
w9wi said:thunderradio said:Nope . Glitch occured as KTVT was switching a freq. for better coverage after the recent HD conversion. AN "electronic burp" happened ,thus the earthquake warning. How in the world can you warn about an impending earthquake? Maybe the spirit of Charlton Heston can clues us in from his Movie in 1974(with SENSUROUND).
it is difficult to see a connection between transmitter work and inadvertent triggering of an EAS event, especially *this* EAS event. (there *is* always Murphy's Law, but...)
Some boxes have provisions for single-button activation of a Required Weekly Test. I suppose it's possible some boxes (I'm not familiar with all of them) can be configured to trigger *any* valid alert from a single contact closure. But given the frequency of earthquakes in North Texas (not!) it's hard to imagine KTVT would have programmed an Earthquake Warning to a hot-key/GPI closure.
I would be pretty confident someone, somewhere intentionally loaded an Earthquake Warning into their EAS box, probably for testing purposes, and forgot to patch out the box before running the test. And not necessarily at KTVT. It could have happened at one of the EAS Local Primaries, at the NWS, or at one of the local emergency agencies with the authority to issue EAS alerts.
It is VERY possible! Some stations house their EAS equipment in the same room as the transmitter. An engineer working near the box could accidently hit a button to cause the unit to transmit the alert.
CBS 11 KTVT.....missed up on this DTV channel switch. The EAS problem was in the change over to DTV channel 19. I have lower signal on DTV RF 19 than DTV RF 11. My signal on DTV 11 is 92...now DTV 19 is 82. The main problem is people do not know what type TV antenna they need. Most of the DTV RF channels are on UHF in DFW market now...only WFAA DTV 8, KFWD 52 DTV 9, and KTVT was on DTV 11 only VHF-high station.
I hope CBS 11 is happy now. Signal still sick!!! All DTV stations need to run 1,000,000 WATTS to have same coverage as analog signal.
Dan-the-MAN!!!
I hope CBS 11 is happy now. Signal still sick!!! All DTV stations need to run 1,000,000 WATTS to have same coverage as analog signal.
Dan-the-MAN!!!
scrtr84 said:w9wi said:thunderradio said:Nope . Glitch occured as KTVT was switching a freq. for better coverage after the recent HD conversion. AN "electronic burp" happened ,thus the earthquake warning. How in the world can you warn about an impending earthquake? Maybe the spirit of Charlton Heston can clues us in from his Movie in 1974(with SENSUROUND).
it is difficult to see a connection between transmitter work and inadvertent triggering of an EAS event, especially *this* EAS event. (there *is* always Murphy's Law, but...)
Some boxes have provisions for single-button activation of a Required Weekly Test. I suppose it's possible some boxes (I'm not familiar with all of them) can be configured to trigger *any* valid alert from a single contact closure. But given the frequency of earthquakes in North Texas (not!) it's hard to imagine KTVT would have programmed an Earthquake Warning to a hot-key/GPI closure.
I would be pretty confident someone, somewhere intentionally loaded an Earthquake Warning into their EAS box, probably for testing purposes, and forgot to patch out the box before running the test. And not necessarily at KTVT. It could have happened at one of the EAS Local Primaries, at the NWS, or at one of the local emergency agencies with the authority to issue EAS alerts.
It is VERY possible! Some stations house their EAS equipment in the same room as the transmitter. An engineer working near the box could accidently hit a button to cause the unit to transmit the alert.
At least with the boxes I'm familiar with, he'd have to hit **at least** three buttons in proper order to initiate anything besides a Required Weekly Test. The way the box at our station is configured it would take *nine* keypresses in proper order. (we have NOT taken any unusual security precautions)
I won't say it *can't* happen but it's far more difficult than simply bumping ONE wrong button.
Most of the retailers are selling UHF antennas that are "HD Ready" which is a joke. Same frequency range as before just different transmit method. But the public sees HD and think it will work on every HD channel. Most people don't know that a VHF antenna must be physically larger than a UHF to get similar range. But they wonder why the little 1-foot-square antenna on top of the TV won't pull in channel 8.
I think OTA reception was under-estimated. I'd venture a guess that many more are using antennas than originally thought by dropping expensive cable/satellite in the current economy. Easy way to pick up an extra $100 a month if you are in a jam which a lot of folks are. It would be the first bill I would eliminate if I had to.
At switchover there was a perfect opportunity to get everyone on the same wavelength so to speak. All stations UHF on one kind of antenna - done. But the feds blew it. Quite a few stations across the US are bailing on VHF for same reason as KTVT, citing consumer confusion & lost ratings. I'd bet Low VHF 2-6 will be sold off to the lowest bidder first since it is practically dead now, then High VHF 7-13 could be soon after. Would give the feds a few million very needed bucks & help everyone's antenna woes.
Oh yeah, then there's that whole HD-Radio thing. Wonder why it isn't taking off? Oh yeah, same people are "educating" the public.
I think OTA reception was under-estimated. I'd venture a guess that many more are using antennas than originally thought by dropping expensive cable/satellite in the current economy. Easy way to pick up an extra $100 a month if you are in a jam which a lot of folks are. It would be the first bill I would eliminate if I had to.
At switchover there was a perfect opportunity to get everyone on the same wavelength so to speak. All stations UHF on one kind of antenna - done. But the feds blew it. Quite a few stations across the US are bailing on VHF for same reason as KTVT, citing consumer confusion & lost ratings. I'd bet Low VHF 2-6 will be sold off to the lowest bidder first since it is practically dead now, then High VHF 7-13 could be soon after. Would give the feds a few million very needed bucks & help everyone's antenna woes.
Oh yeah, then there's that whole HD-Radio thing. Wonder why it isn't taking off? Oh yeah, same people are "educating" the public.
w9wi said:At least with the boxes I'm familiar with, he'd have to hit **at least** three buttons in proper order to initiate anything besides a Required Weekly Test. The way the box at our station is configured it would take *nine* keypresses in proper order. (we have NOT taken any unusual security precautions)
I won't say it *can't* happen but it's far more difficult than simply bumping ONE wrong button.
I think it depends on who makes the box, where it's located physically and whether security options are enabled / disabled. I'm not saying for sure that is what happened. It's just to me that seems more likely than this so-called signal mixup thing. If someone could explain that scenario in more detail, I might understand it better.
On other thing... One of the EAS boxes I have worked with, somehow or another got programmed to automatically generate at least one transmission. It did so automatically, regardless of whether or not the unit was in manual or auto forward.
scrtr84 said:w9wi said:At least with the boxes I'm familiar with, he'd have to hit **at least** three buttons in proper order to initiate anything besides a Required Weekly Test. The way the box at our station is configured it would take *nine* keypresses in proper order. (we have NOT taken any unusual security precautions)
I won't say it *can't* happen but it's far more difficult than simply bumping ONE wrong button.
I think it depends on who makes the box, where it's located physically and whether security options are enabled / disabled. I'm not saying for sure that is what happened. It's just to me that seems more likely than this so-called signal mixup thing. If someone could explain that scenario in more detail, I might understand it better.
On other thing... One of the EAS boxes I have worked with, somehow or another got programmed to automatically generate at least one transmission. It did so automatically, regardless of whether or not the unit was in manual or auto forward.
Definitely someone, somewhere, somehow set up a wrong alert and, presumably inadvertently, put it on the air. One possibility is that it was someone at KTVT that made that mistake; the other is that someone at one of the EAS sources KTVT monitors made the mistake, and KTVT's box was set up to relay it.
The only point I'm trying to make is that I don't think it had anything to do with KTVT's frequency change. It's VERY unlikely any alert except Required Weekly Test could be issued through a single mistaken keystroke. I think someone *intended* to cause an EAS box to run an earthquake warning; they just didn't intend for it to get on the air -- they didn't realize the EAS box was in the active air path.
w9wi said:The only point I'm trying to make is that I don't think it had anything to do with KTVT's frequency change.
Right. That's a suggestion that I think was provided a few posts back, as being the cause of this event. I just do not see how a frequency change could trip any type of EAS event. Human error is indeed most likely.
T
thunderradio
Guest
Simple deduction: The eas went out exactly when the reconfiguration of the KTVT HD signal was switching over. It can (and yes its a 1000000 to 1 shot) cause an electrical surge just enough to cause the eas to be weird. You ahve power strips on your pc right? Why, a surge can pop a chip in it. Just becasue a TV station has a bigger surge protection doesnt mean its not infalliable. If it was designed and programmed by a human it can at times behave like one. The timing of the switch and the eas was too close to be coincidental.
thunderradio said:Simple deduction: The eas went out exactly when the reconfiguration of the KTVT HD signal was switching over. It can (and yes its a 1000000 to 1 shot) cause an electrical surge just enough to cause the eas to be weird. You ahve power strips on your pc right? Why, a surge can pop a chip in it. Just becasue a TV station has a bigger surge protection doesnt mean its not infalliable. If it was designed and programmed by a human it can at times behave like one. The timing of the switch and the eas was too close to be coincidental.
If that was the cause, then their facility is not properly grounded to earth. I have seen studio upon studio where power strips are all over the place. The good facilities connect an additional ground to earth, from the equipment chassis. This is an extra safety ground, along with the standard three prong plugs.
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