EAS NOT SO EASY

Only two words (and their derivations) in the English language begin with the letters EAS, "east" and "easy." The rest are all acronyms which includes "E.A.S." The Emergency Announcement System. Today at 2:00 PM was the test for that system. For the most part the broadcasters were on the ball. Homeland security however, screwed up. But we all already knew that Homeland Security was incompetent and useless; look at the TSA. There is no reason to expect that FEMA would get this right on the first try.

EAS Test 11/09/2011


What went out sounded like a success at first with the initial data tones but then that was followed by a few seconds of muffled, noisy audio with unintelligible multiple voices, feedback,  then more layers of the data tones and the same mesage. thsi repeated in layers until it was a wall of static, feedback, distortion and white noise. That was followed by a few seconds of staticky silence, and then the closing EOM tones.  Oh well it went better than CONELRAD.

Some areas reported no message, or an inaudible instead of the noisy message. But this clip above is by all reports totally typical coast-to-coast. What happened is that all the networked senders and receivers and all the broadcasters were working fine. There were some metro failures including areas south of Portland, OR. There have been no significant reported problems with either they weekly or monthly required tests prior to this.  So, we know the problem stems from some failure in the EAN on the part of FEMA.  EngineeringRadio.us reported a similar experience, more here.