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National EAS Test Failures

Lazy J said:
HEY GUYS! Anybody else think this may partially be SAGE's fault??

Read this line from Sage's "Audio Level Service Bulletin":

The “output appears on the input” issue only shows up if the alert is sent in the “automatic relay” mode, meaning the ENDEC starts retransmitting the alert while it is still receiving the incoming alert (this include the EAN). In this mode, if the audio output is excessive, you will hear what appears to be a mix of two different alerts, but what you are hearing is the start of the original alert, delayed by about 20 seconds.

If the PEP station is using a SAGE ENDEC, sends to an LP1 with a SAGE ENDEC, received by local stations using a SAGE ENDEC.

No wonder it was a garbled mess. I would have thought SAGE would have corrected this problem during R&D. Now they have to share some of the blame for a BOTCHED test.
Click to expand...


Now hang on a minute. You didn't quote all the relevant parts! What is written above is what Sage warns you will happen if you fail to set up your box correctly with proper input levels!

I'll grant you I would have preferred that the Sage box had been built with greater headroom on the inputs, but it is NOT Sage's fault if we don't set it up according to their docs. Pulleeease!
 
Here in NH, we had about 10 seconds of tones, then about 90 seconds of someone gargling razorblades underwater.

Thank God it was just a test.....if it was an actual emergency, it would have taken Penn State 10 years to report it! ;D
 
What I heard reminded me of sitting in my room in the 70’s at night listening fascinated to the hash of hundreds of stations on the local service AM channels…the chatter of all those skywave signals.

Sort of brought a tear of nostalgia to my eye.
 
Gorman-Redlich box here relayed fine, for some reason it waited and got it from public radio rather than our primary monitor point, which was good. Relayed the test with clean audio, end, back to regular programming.

Station across town has a sage, they got the first word of audio message, dead air until end.

We're in MS btw.
 
Okay, so we know most of the bad stuff that happened and we know it was pretty wide spread. So, were there any locations where the test came through properly and with clean audio that didn't have an echo? If so, what's different about them vs. the rest of us?
 
WNTIRadio said:
Why can't every station just have a Ku band box to get the national level tests? Or even the states for that matter. Use the daisy chain of stations as a back up in case Iran or North Korea knocks the bird out of the sky. If I can get TV on a little 18" dish, why not do the same thing for EAS for ALL stations?!

Dumb. The whole thing is really dumb. It would be state of the art in 1955, but not now.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I feel the same way. The LNB can even look at two orbital slots so you have redundancy. The RWT and RMT can be downloaded to stations via an IP channel and if a "live break in" is needed, switch to an audio channel send a contact closure to have the box override the air chain and you're in business. In the "digital world", why are we doing it this way?
 
stewie said:
WNTIRadio said:
Why can't every station just have a Ku band box to get the national level tests? Or even the states for that matter. Use the daisy chain of stations as a back up in case Iran or North Korea knocks the bird out of the sky. If I can get TV on a little 18" dish, why not do the same thing for EAS for ALL stations?!

Dumb. The whole thing is really dumb. It would be state of the art in 1955, but not now.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I feel the same way. The LNB can even look at two orbital slots so you have redundancy. The RWT and RMT can be downloaded to stations via an IP channel and if a "live break in" is needed, switch to an audio channel send a contact closure to have the box override the air chain and you're in business. In the "digital world", why are we doing it this way?
Click to expand...

I've read others comment on jamming. Fair enough but with multiple orbital slots, a encrypted data feed and a cookie cutter box and dish to send out to each station with an IP backup, how is this not a better solution than what we have today?
 
I'm wondering what the feasibility of using the cellular network as the PEP would be? It's a robust, nationwide network and the sites are usually build with redundancy and often backup generators or batteries. You could have a "cellular" receiver and every broadcast station would just monitor the cellular network. That would get rid of the daisy chain system and help with audio problems. Thoughts?
 
level42 said:
I'm wondering what the feasibility of using the cellular network as the PEP would be? It's a robust, nationwide network and the sites are usually build with redundancy and often backup generators or batteries. You could have a "cellular" receiver and every broadcast station would just monitor the cellular network. That would get rid of the daisy chain system and help with audio problems. Thoughts?
Click to expand...

Whatever the outcome of the multiple failures of yesterdays tests and potential solutions for a national alerting network, I sincerely hope the powers that be don't go forward with forcing the replacement of EAS devices until someone has genuinely figured this mess out. I volunteer for a non com that really doesn't need to spend another $2k for a box that doesn't work any better than what's in place. They got through the test by the way, including the multiple duck farts, understandable though noisy audio, more duck farts and a very fortunate EOM to return them to programming without human intervention.
 
Well, I see that the form 3 form is intuitive and after submitting the facility number, it retrieves the prior (form 1) data. Additionally, it asks for information that is on your tape or in the ENDEC file.

My Bad ::)
 
OK, well then looking at this Form 3, one of the questions is - Explanation (If you only passed the alert to a subset of your communities, please specify). What kind of response does the FCC want for this question? Let's say that no other stations are monitoring ours, we are simply PN (Participating National). Do they want you to name the communites you have programmed into your EAS box as the local communities? Looking at 1 of my printouts for this EAN, my normal local area communities is now replaced as "the United States."
 
Here's what happened: http://www.thebdr.net/articles/fcc/eas/eas.html I question why they chose a telephone company conference bridge in the first place for the PEP distribution. I would want to have a seperate path to each PEP directly with a distribution amplifer isolating each of them. In fact, I'd be inclined to go buy some RDL amps and put one each for each station. It could be daisychain bridge wired to the EAS Endec. The idea here is that there would be no way audio from one station could get onto audio to another. The take-away from all of this is that BROADCASTERS did their job. Maybe it's time FEMA open its facilities up to BROADCASTERS that seem to be able to make things work and let us redesign something that WORKS for future tests. There are a myriad of things that went wrong, but I feel the great majority of Americans would have been able to get the message if it weren't for the audio bridge issue.
 
Ahaha. Tried to fill out form 3. The system kicked it back because the FRN wasn't submitted, while the form clearly says supplying the FRN is is optional.
 
stacker said:
Ahaha. Tried to fill out form 3. The system kicked it back because the FRN wasn't submitted, while the form clearly says supplying the FRN is is optional.
Click to expand...

Well, it might depend upon what the definition of "is" is. ;D
 
OKCRAdioGuy: excellent suggestion if that's where the looping problem came from: lack of ISOLATION - duh. If all the PEP's are on one line, then isolate them so we don't the EOM while the message starts;
However,
It still doesn't explain the white noise on our LP-1/LP-2 here.
Our PBS didn't wait until the 2:03 mark, it immediately dumped the 'slide' on right away with the echo loops while everyone else waited 3 minutes for the trainwreck to proceed with no audio whatsoever.
 
stacker said:
Ahaha. Tried to fill out form 3. The system kicked it back because the FRN wasn't submitted, while the form clearly says supplying the FRN is is optional.
Click to expand...

I filled out 14 of them today with no problem. Hit DEL a couple of times
in the FRN field either before you hit submit or when it warns you.
They must have stuffed some spaces in there ...
 
Why not use OTA DTV as the relay cascading network. You could slice off an encrypted PID that radiostations could monitor for EAS messages. I imagine this could be implemented fairly easy with already existing systems.
 
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