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EAS National Test JustBroadcast On Comcast Cable

B

BurnedOutOnTheBoards

I just watched a National EAS Test on Comcast Cable – it featured eight “pages” of data on the screen listing all California counties. Haven't heard an attempt of one on radio yet......did any of you hear one or two on a local radio station?

The first Comcast attempt had no audio other than the EAS Alert tones. The second attempt, several minutes later, featured such garbled audio as to be completely unintelligible. I had a video tape recording at the time, and played it back twice – absolutely no way anyone could understand what the alert said.

It seems to me that the EAS system, despite decades of effort, still can’t get its act together. Yes, it has improved over the years, and it occasionally does great work {as in several Amber Alerts} but I’ve heard far too many tests and actual alerts air with no audio or unintelligible audio.
 
BurnedOutOnTheBoards said:
I just watched a National EAS Test on Comcast Cable – it featured eight “pages” of data on the screen listing all California counties. Haven't heard an attempt of one on radio yet......did any of you hear one or two on a local radio station?

The first Comcast attempt had no audio other than the EAS Alert tones. The second attempt, several minutes later, featured such garbled audio as to be completely unintelligible. I had a video tape recording at the time, and played it back twice – absolutely no way anyone could understand what the alert said.

It seems to me that the EAS system, despite decades of effort, still can’t get its act together. Yes, it has improved over the years, and it occasionally does great work {as in several Amber Alerts} but I’ve heard far too many tests and actual alerts air with no audio or unintelligible audio.
Click to expand...

I heard and saw it come through. It was a Required Monthly Test. The audio was terrible.

It sounds like Comcast's using one Endec for all their systems. That, or they have it programmed with more counties than this one unit covers. If they use a different unit for each area (Sac, Yuba City, Grass Valley/Nevada City, etc.), they should program it to only cover the counties each site covers. If you don't delete counties not covered, it will run alerts that don't apply to the area.

Later, I saw it come through as a crawl on KOVR-HD. The interesting thing was a crawl announcing the recent tornado warnings. Their unit must have forwarded the previous event. I saw it for several minutes before going onto other work.
 
Steven......

The KOVR crawl was about the tornado warnings?! Ah - nothing quite like having outdated EAS info broadcast that has zero relationship to what really should be a simple, scheduled monthly test.
 
BurnedOutOnTheBoards said:
Steven......

The KOVR crawl was about the tornado warnings?! Ah - nothing quite like having outdated EAS info broadcast that has zero relationship to what really should be a simple, scheduled monthly test.
Click to expand...

Yep. Announcing the whole line of storms. That's why I got such a kick out of seeing it broadcast to...oh nothing...just a few million viewers.

BTW, I saw a funnel start to come down as it passed over Highway 49. It looked surreal. This tornado hit my colleague's house right off 49. A huge limb smashed his truck. He had other damage as well. Several trees were pulled right out of the ground.
 
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