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EAS Self Promotion

K

K6JHU

I was in a Mexican restaurant the other day and the KMEX feed was interrupted by the EAS test. The voice announcement went somehting like. "This is a test of the EAS. This is Sherriff Lee Baca coming to you from the Emergency Operations Center. In the event of an emergency we will be here in the state of the art emergency operations cetner to bring you...." for about 30 seconds or more.

Two issues:
1. You are interrupting the program. Do what you need to do and get it oiver with. Forget the commercial.
2. Since this was KMEX, shouldn't some of the self promotion time be used to give the instructions in Spanish.
 
That's a Monthly Required Test as opposed to the shorter Weekly Required Test. The Monthly tests are awful. Bad quality, usually hissy, almost white noisy and the VU is always low. Sherman Block was the Sheriff when these went into effect and his were pretty bad, but may be even worse with Lee Baca. The Monthly does seem to try and explain what's going on as the old EBS tests used to. Is that the "commercial" aspect you sited?

Never thought about whether the test on a Spanish station should be in Spanish. Would make sense, but I guess the right wingers in the FCC think that if you live here you should know English. How do you say "kiss your &%$$ goodbye" in Spanish?
 
The stations have no control over the content or quality of these monthly tests as they come from the local authorities who, in the event of a real emergency, would be the ones who actually activate the EAS and send the needed information.

Looking at the EAS-CAP regulations there is nothing that says the message must be in multiple languages so it would probably be at the discretion of the local authorities to provide it.

http://www.eas-cap.org/Recommendation EAS-CAP-0.1.pdf

c5
 
I think that the original post had the intention of criticizing Sheriff Baca more than the station. Most other places I've heard these tests do not have that self aggrandizing commercial which LA county does. Here in Iowa, or where I am, they just do the test and go right back to the normal program. We've had a few recent real case scenarios with tornado and severe thunderstorm alerts and in those they just patch in the NOAA weather broadcast. One station then followed with a live special news/weather cast from their studio but the rest went back to the music.

But the other posters are correct, the county sends the material and I am sure that if a station axed it or replaced it with a translation that there would be a price to pay. I am not sure why the quality has to be so bad, I understand the weather radio, it sounds like it is, though why it can not be better I can't say. But the volume is much lower even tuning with a weather radio as well so it is hard to hear.

In an actual emergency when the safety officials are relaying information I would hope for at least something approaching normal telephone quality audio. In an emergency people need to be able to hear and understand what is being said. As to Spanish I suppose but there is only one feed and so unless they upgrade to permit multiple language feeds which would again be the government agency responsibility not that of the broadcasters.
 
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