What stations didn't air the EAS test

[dumber than a box of hair]

not sure how this could work but what if BZ AM was monitoring BZ FM and BZ FM was monitoring BZ AM?

WBZ (AM) is a National Primary station (formerly called Primary Entry Point), which gets its national EAS tests and alerts directly from FEMA and/or the White House Communications Agency. IIRC there are only about 25 NP stations in the entire country. WBZ-FM is the State Primary station, and the Local Primary station for the greater Boston area.

Thus, WBZ (AM) got yesterday's test first, and WBZ-FM would have picked it up from them.

 

[4CX1000A]

I'm curious, when did the word issues replace problems?

I often hear folks from a sales background say "problems" has negative connotations, and they won't use it. They say "challenges" instead.

 

[chrish]

Sorry to say America the delusional.....problems are negative no matter how you try to disguise them.

 

[dumber than a box of hair]

The actual alert was very trippy, sounded like stations were taking a feed from each other causing a loop - probably an 18 second loop.

It actually sounded like a far more basic problem, one that anyone who's ever worked in radio would recognize instantly: unmuted speakers too close to the live microphone.

I found out what the real problem was. The feed from FEMA to the PEP stations is an old-fashioned telco conference bridge. FEMA was supposed to program the EAS boxes at the PEP stations for "receive only" mode...IOW, only audio coming from FEMA was supposed to be on the bridge. However, at least several of the boxes were still operating in two-way mode, so the EAS test programming was feeding back to FEMA and therefore mixed with the audio going out from FEMA.

 

[Rick]

If anyone is interested on further discussion about how the national EAS test went with comments from broadcast engineers (including WOR), you must see "This Week in Radio Tech" on Leo Laporte's TWiT network. See Episode 106: Duck Farts. They also play an aircheck of how the test went on WOR. If you want to jump right to the part that they begin discussing it, jump to 3:27. Here is the link: http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-radio-tech/106

 

[fccman]

I had on 879thewave stream and he did it. Can someone ask him why he did it, every time I go by the studio its closed.

 

[carmen]

at the most a a Mac App and radio tuned to WBZ is all you need to get on board. im sure you can fire off an AppleScript to change audio-routing when an EAS comes through

 

[dumber than a box of hair]

at the most a a Mac App and radio tuned to WBZ is all you need to get on board. im sure you can fire off an AppleScript to change audio-routing when an EAS comes through

If this were possible using a computer, there would be no business whatsoever for the equipment manufacturers that sell EAS boxes. Station owners would have jumped on it years ago.

 

[aaronread]

It IS possible to do it with a computer, but to meet the requirements of Part 11 is not easy. Well, actually it's not technically hard but it's tricky because the mandated reliability of EAS is, in theory, far stricter than any computer would deliver. The legal liability is something that no software coder has wanted to deal with, AFAIK.

But you could use AlertReady to monitor for incoming EAS alerts and then MTS EAS Encoder-II to turn them around and forward them.

Legally it'd be pretty dicey, though. You're taking a system that's supposed to be almost completely automated and trying to do it all manually. That's begging for trouble.

 

[carmen]

WHOM just aired a notice about a 3-minute siren test on wednesday at 1230 pm in MA - appears to be related to nuclear power plants