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Weather bulletins

V

vchimpanzee

I was just reading about weather bulletins on the South Carolina board (yes, I'm behind).

So I thought I'd mention what happened Saturday morning about 9:30 on Country Legends 98.3. I was just going to the grocery. No more than a mile or two, with the speed limit 35. I heard two separate weather bulletins from the Emergecny Broadcast System during that time. It really sounded bad.

Even on the way home I heard one weather bulletin.

I'm curious how this works. The station is mostly automated, I believe. So somehow they have a way to broadcast these bulletins.
 
Broadcaster are REQUIRED to run the EAS Tests, however are not required to run the actual alerts (which is why the old message said "in voluntary cooperation with...".

Stations that operate unattended, or with a single operator watching multiple stations, will often have the EAS system installed in the audio chain just before the STL - thus allowing for the automation of tests and alerts.

The EAS box can be programmed to respond to (and air) reports by level of severity and/or by geography.

Stations that find themselves serving two or more operational areas, can end up running a rash of report as a thunderstorm mores through the region.

You will notice that the local television stations never run these alerts, instead, have their own people do alerts on the air.
 
I think it's good that a local station is giving local information as Country Legends apparently does. So many of the Local stations tell you nothing about local weather and such. A month ago during a storm a large power outage happened in Winston Salem. My power was off and so was a friend who lived in another part of town. In the past I could immediately go to WSJS and on the next break would have received some kind of update. NOTHING! Nothing from them all night on this matter. I had to turn on a battery TV and got info from WXII.
 
SJS's EAS is not wired into the audio chain. The operator has to activate the system and put the alert on the air via the console. I have hear, although can not confirm tha WSJS and WMFR are unattended overnight. They need to rewire EAS to be automatic (like Country Legends).
 
XTalker said:
SJS's EAS is not wired into the audio chain. The operator has to activate the system and put the alert on the air via the console. I have hear, although can not confirm tha WSJS and WMFR are unattended overnight. They need to rewire EAS to be automatic (like Country Legends).
Click to expand...
That's probably a good point in general but in the case of he power being out the other day, no EAS would pick that up as far as I have heard. Totally up to whoever is on at the station and the TOOLS and INSTRUCTIONS management has given them to work with. WSJS is no longer in the same league they once were. Another one bits the dust.

BTW it is mandatory that EAS can automatically run a presidential alert and mandatory that monthy tests be passed on within 15 minutes. If WSJS does not have that capability they are in violation.
 
BTW it is mandatory that EAS can automatically run a presidential alert and mandatory that monthy tests be passed on within 15 minutes. If WSJS does not have that capability they are in violation.
Click to expand...

The rules were changed a few years ago and stations now have an hour to relay the monthly test.

Funny thing about that presidential alert capability, aka "Emergency Action Notification"...it has never been officially end-to-end tested to my knowledge. There have been some botched closed-circuit tests that accidentally triggered EANs over a state or portions of several states, but never a real live intentional test since EAS was instituted.

So we don't really know if that part works as intended. In most cases where the president is going to speak to the public during an emergency, the major networks are going to be covering it wall to wall anyway. If EAS suddenly becomes the only way for the president to get a message out, you can be sure that life as we know it will have radically changed.
 
Seems like I read in one of the industry rags where the current EAS system is in for a major overhaul in the near future... and there was talk about our current EAS gear being rendered obsolete. I agree that the current system is mostly ineffective.
 
Our current system, which is not that old really, was ineffective the day it was implimented. Should have been a storage system of some sorts, even a floppy would have been a start.
 
Busby has been gone quite a while.

As for the power outage, it was likely an isolated one and probably not something that would attract the attention of a newsroom unless they got a tip. Was your phone down, too?
 
Thursday night and last night, every time there was a weather bulletin, the Emergency Broadcasting System took over and there was no sound on my CW station. :mad: And they couldn't just say where the storm was. they had to give advice too.

This is ridiculous. There is video. Just do crawls. The ABC station doesn't do any audio.

To make this about radio, I did notice WZTK was doing continuous coverage (apparently) around 11. I happened to turn to WKZL just as the DJ was announcing the latest, but it was just a brief interruption.
 
What you experienced with the CW station is pretty normal. Stations without news departments generally have little to do other than put the official weather service announcements on the air. I doubt there is anyone on duty who could do the crawl at many of those stations. The official NOAA Weather Sevice material is pretty bland.

I thought Channel 12 did a horrible job. Ms Pope spent most of the evening talking to someone in the control room and kept flashing different views so on one could actually focus on the storm. Channel 8 did a much better job as far as TV is concerned.

ZTK, unlike KZL (and other music stations) has a good deal with their weather service (Randy Jackson). I am sure Randy is doing other stations around the country and has the staff to be able to do it. He also has the passion for it!
 
XTalker nailed it - generally stations with News Departments opt NOT to participate in the Emergency Alert System because their News Department can produce a better crawl than the generic crawl distributed by the state or National Weather Service. Also they have access to far better and more current information.

It's why the News TV stations wipe up the ratings during weather events - going from 30% of the audience to well over 70% of the audience.

The EAS System was NOT designed for TV. There is no easy way to handle EAS for High Definition. The old way was a very cheap character generator ($2K) attached to the EAS equipment to add a downstream crawl. To do that in HD adds $15K or more to the costs. To make matters worse, the information is so generic that most people could figure it out by looking out the window.
 
WXII's tornado coverage was lame. They must have had every microphone in the studio turned wide open - you could hear every cough, burp and fart. Same thing when Lanie quit talking.
 
I was in CA for 12 years and they own a tv station in Salinas/Monterey that was worse that WXII and it sucked worse than this one :)
 
I never heard anything up and down the dial on radio..What was amazing was 12 and 8 kept building the story about the Troy tornado going to hit in just a few minutes and then BOOM...all of a sudden they switched to network programming.. I swear..I don't know it all, but there is some seriously lacking management in the Triad in radio and television! I'm glad I am "Over the hill!"
 
I listened to SJS and from what I remember they did an OK job. At least they were on top of it. Listenned a little to KZL also and they at least had a live person on, pretty good also.
 
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