Mixed, at least in my neck of the woods. I was stationed at a LP-1 station which was monitoring a PEP station directly. On my end, the test went fine without intervention. Please excuse the cellphone video, I am used to my good camera, which I left at home.
Many others in the New York area had problems. Stations with newer SAGE (Blue front) CAP capable EAS ENDECS had issues, even the ones that were also monitoring the PEP stations directly.
Many of those stations broadcast the header tones and about 10 seconds of audio. The audio abruptly stops and is followed by twenty seconds of dead air followed by the EOM. I can speculate that the SAGE EAS units should be checked for proper configuration and be tested back to back while receiving duplicate messages from different sources spaced apart by ten seconds.
Several stations downstream from the LP-1 stations did not receive anything at all. Others received the alert tones but no audio, some had high levels of background noise, thirty seconds of static, audio cut off, etc. All in all, most would look at this and say “Thank God it wasn’t a real emergency.” Silver lining: For all those that are concerned that the federal government will attempt to diabolically take over the entire broadcast spectrum and say evil things; Doh! foiled again.
FEMA has reduced the audio portion of the national EAS test scheduled for 2pm on 11/9/11 from over two minutes to thirty seconds. This should make the overall time of the test between 45 and 60 seconds, including header and EOM tones.
The change comes directly from the top of Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano. No reasons given. New PSA’s and other information is being prepared for stations to use when informing the public.
It is a pretty good simulation of what will happen on November 9th. The script used is not the actual script that will be used for the national test.
After the test, the video shows how to bail out of the national test in the event that a valid EAN is not received. This is important information, as this particular failure has occurred many times in the past. If the LP-1 or PEP station that transmitted the test fails to send a valid EOM, the EAS unit will continue to transmit that station’s programming indefinitely. If the LP-1 or PEP station resumes regular programming while the EAS unit is relaying their programming over the air, that would be a good indication that the LP-1 or PEP station has failed to send a valid EOM.
November 9, 2011 at 2pm EST, FEMA will be testing EAS with it’s first ever national level test. To promote that event, they have released a twenty eight page “tool kit,” (near the bottom of the page) designed to help everyone get through the test. It should be interesting. According to FEMA:
The nationwide EAS Test is not a pass or fail measure, nor will it specifically test Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) compliant equipment (although CAP compliant equipment should pass the Emergency Action Notification [EAN] live-code in the same manner as legacy EAS equipment).
They will release a Emergency Action Notification (EAN) to all the Primary Entry Point (PEP) stations, which should then flow down stream through all the radio, television, cable systems, and direct broadcast satellite systems. The test should last about two minutes and will conclude with a standard EOM.
I doubt very much it will sound like this:
That is WHEN, Syracuse, NY singing EBS test. A bit of originality there. WHEN played this for their weekly EBS test for the better part of the 70′s. Naturally, the FCC found out about it and told them to stop. Shame, really, it is kind of catchy.
If you have some spare time, download the tool kit and study up for the test.
Six weeks to go and time is moving fast. Many stations of a particular group have not done the required CAP upgrades to their EAS equipment. I’d imagine that we will be running around installing and programming these things at the last moment.
A list of certified EAS equipment vendors is available from the FCC website. The new FCC website, which seems to be dedicated to bringing broadband to America, somewhat at the expense of everything else. More about that later.
About CAP and EAS; I hope the effort and expense is worth it. Those CAP converters and CAP compliant EAS machines are not cheap. I would think that after all that mandated spending, the new, new EAS works better than the old new EAS which left quite a bit to be desired. I am still skeptical of the internet based distribution system, as the internet has proven to be less than 100% reliable in all locations. The method seems to violate the KISS principle, of which I am a firm believer. In any case, I will reserve judgement until after the nation wide test on November 9, 2011.
Regarding that test, I have already read some “expectations management” statements from FEMA and the FCC. I have to say, if, given a years notice to install the equipment and do local testing before the big test, the new system does not show great improvements over the old EAS, it is time to scrap EAS altogether. It would be far better to tell the public they are on their own and recommend buying NOAA weather radios or rather NOAA All Hazards radios to receive their emergency information on. Supplement that with an e-mail notification system like NY Alert, which I use for urgent traffic and weather information and be done with it. This way, at least, nobody will be expecting the nearest automated station from the borg collective to supply meaningful, up to date information.
This is a test, you have been warned. The FCC has scheduled the first nationwide mandatory EAS test for November 9th, 2011 at 2pm EST (1900 UTC). According to James A. Barnett, Jr., Chief, Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau:
For the test, FEMA will trigger the EAS “cascade” architecture by transmitting the EAS code used for national level emergencies to the first level of broadcast stations in the national-level of the EAS, which in turn will rebroadcast the alert to the general public, as well as to the next level of EAS participants monitoring them. This should continue through all levels of the system until the alert has been distributed throughout the entire county.
Since this date is beyond the CAP deadline of September 30, 2011, it seems like CAP would be the distribution method, but there is not anything I can find to verify that. The above paragraph makes it sound like the PEP system might be used.
This will be an interesting evolution for a number of reasons. If the EAS system fails operate as planned after giving five months warning for a nationwide test, it would point toward a fundamental design flaw in the system. A more realistic test of the EAS system would involve perhaps one hours notice and then trigger the event. Notice should be given so that broadcast station personal can answer questions from the listening and viewing public.
Then there is the EAS EAN protocol itself. There are many that feel, rightly or wrongly, that the federal government should not be able to take control of privately owned broadcast stations and cable systems for any reason. The way that the EAS encoder/decoder units are now required to be wired into the audio air chain means it would be very hard to override any mandatory alert, such as an EAN, if there were a reason to do that. There have been several instances of false alerts, WGN-AM being the most recent, where programming on down stream broadcast and cable systems were disrupted for several minutes.
So, save the date. It will no doubt be interesting to see how this all works.
Lots of ink has been spilled about the new CAP (Common Alert Protocol)implementation and what it all means. Since the FCC started the six month CAP clock ticking on September 30th of last year, they have extended the deadline by six months to September 30, 2011.
The idea of upgrading EAS is a good one. When EAS replaced EBS in 1997 it was supposed to do away with the over the air relay system also known as the daisy chain. This was left over from the 1960′s CONELRAD system implemented by Kennedy. That replacement never occurred and stations today are still monitoring other broadcasting stations for their EAS alerts. The daisy chain was and still is the source of all EBS and EAS failures.
CAP is supposed to eliminate that weak link by allowing the EAS unit to access government IPAWS message servers directly, allowing FEMA to automatically send out alert messages to designated areas. This has some libertarians in an uproar, as they see government intrusion and taking over privately owned radio stations to broadcast emergency information as a form of tyranny. In as much as the definition of “emergency message” has not been codified by FEMA in any of their information, they may have a point. In the past, the general definition of emergency communications were those that were pertaining to imminent threats to the safety of life and property. According to Executive Order 13407, Public Alert and Warning System, the purpose is to:
…have an effective, reliable, integrated, flexible, and comprehensive system to alert and warn the American people in situations of war, terrorist attack, natural disaster, or other hazards to public safety and well-being…
Which is certainly much more broad in scope. How does one define a hazard to “well-being?”
SAGE alerting systems have completely revamped their ENDEC to include CAP 1.2. It uses the internet to connect to IPAWS servers and receive CAP messages. As the SAGE ENDEC owners manual notes, participation in local and state level alerts are at the discretion of the station management, as regulated by the current version of FCC Part 11. National level participation is manditory:
Participation at the national level is mandatory for most broadcasters. You may petition the FCC to become a “Non Participating National” station, but you must still receive and broadcast the EAN code, and then leave the air. These requirements are always evolving, refer to the FCC rules, in particular CFR 47 Part 11 for details.
Often times, it is the local emergencies that are greatest and most immediate threats to human life; the tornado, the tsunami, etc. Those are the most pressing threats, not the national level alerts, which were implemented in the 1960′s to warn of a major attack from a foreign country, something not very likely these days.
SAGE ENDEC
Further, the internet has proved to be less than reliable when trouble occurs. During the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001, dial tone, cellphone and internet service for much of lower Manhattan were disrupted because the TELCO facilities were in the buildings that were destroyed. Most internet services rely on wired or fiber optic services provided by TELCO or cable company, which can be effected by power outages, damaged infrastructure and so on, which would likely occur in a major emergency.
It does not seem to be the most robust method for distribution of emergency messages.
At the place of my former employment, there is an issue with AM reception. The building is full of old, electrically noisy fluorescent light balasts, computers, mercury vapor parking lot lights, and every other electrical noise generator under the sun. The second issue is that one of the EAS monitor assignments for two FM class B stations is WABC in NYC. Under normal conditions, WABC puts a fine signal into the area. Listening to it is not problem at my house, in the car and what not. However, at the studio the station is audible, but terribly noisy. Every time one of those FM stations ran a required monthly EAS test originated from WABC, it was full of static and just sounded bad on the air.
The state EAS folks were inflexible as to the monitoring assignment. ”WABC is the PEP station for NY. You should have plenty of signal from WABC at your location,” said they.
At one time, the studio had an active loop antenna (LP-1A) from Belar, which worked, but also seemed to amplify the noise. I decided that the best thing to do was go big and ditch the preamp. I made a diamond shaped receiving loop on two pieces of two by four by eight foot lumber. I wound four turns of #14 stranded wire around this frame and made a 4:1 balun to feed the unbalanced 75 ohm RG-6 coax.
That cured the noise problems and for eight years, WABC sounded pretty good on the EAS monitor.
Fast forward to about a week ago. The roof at the studio building was being redone and all the monitor antennas had to be removed from the roof. The homemade loop was not in good shape. The balun box was full of water, the lumber was cracking and falling apart, the insulation was degraded by UV exposure, etc. My boss asked, “how much to make a new one?” So I said something like forty dollars and a couple of hours. He then said, “Make it so we don’t have to ever make another one.”
Music to my ears. I started by checking my assumptions. I made a model and ran NEC to see what the electrical characteristics for that size loop were on 770 KHz. It came out better than I thought, about 1 ohm resistance and 282 ohms inductive reactance. Fooling around a little more showed that roughly 1.3 uH inductance and 720 pF capacitance in a L network would bring this inline for a 50 ohm feed point. Since this is a receive only antenna, that is not a prime consideration. I am more concerned with noise reduction and maintaining at least the bi-directional quality of a loop antenna.
NEC 2 model AM receive loop
Then, I decided to get fancy. What if the capacitance was put on the end of the loop to ground instead of the feed point. That, in effect should make the loop directional off of the unterminated side. Driving the feed point with a 9:1 balun would also bring up the inductance on the feed point. Finally, grounding the whole thing with a separate ground lead might also get rid of some noise.
The final configuration looks something like this, which is essentially a top loaded vertical:
Low noise AM loop antenna
Now to build it.
Once again, I felt that a non-conductive support was needed, so I used two by four by eight foot lumber, but this time I painted them with oil based paint. The side length worked out to be 5.7 feet per side, or 23 feet per turn for a total of 92 feet of wire.
I purchased 100 feet of PV (photovoltaic) wire (Alpha wire PV-1400), which is UV, heat, moisture resistant and designed to last for 30 years in outdoor, exposed environments.
For the balun box, I used a metal outdoor electrical box with a metal cover. I put a ground wire jumper between the box cover and the ground common to maintain shielding. I used a water tight bushing to feed the antenna wires and the ground wire into the box. I drilled a 3/8 hole for a type F chassis connector. Everything was given a little extra water proofing with some silicone based (RTV) sealant on all threaded junctions.
The spreaders for the wire windings are UV resistant 1 inch PVC conduit. I drilled four holes, three inches apart in each spreader to run the loop wires through.
The balun is 7 trifiler turn of 24 AWG copper wire on an FT-43-102 toroid core. Trifiler means three wires twisted together before winding the toroid core.
I used all stainless steal screws and mounting hardware.
The loop is terminated with a 500 pF, 500 volt ceramic capacitor to ground. Once in place, I am going to experiment with this by jumping it out of the circuit to see what effect it has on noise and signal strength. I may also try replacing it with a 200 ohm resistor and or a 1000 pF capacitor.
The assembly was pretty easy, although time consuming. My four year old son helped me paint the wood and string the wires through the spreaders.
I soldered all wire connections with 5% silver bearing solder.
When the whole thing was assembled, I tested it out with my Drake R8 receiver. It performs much as expected, low noise, directional away from the terminated wire loop. It does not appear to be too narrow banded either, as the stations on the high end of the dial were also received with good signal strength.
Next was loading it on the pickup truck, driving it in and mounting it on the studio building. I got some funny looks from my fellow travelers, then again, I usually do.
For the ground, I purchased an eight foot copper clad grounding rod and pounded it into the ground at the corner of the building. This area is always wet as it is the lowest area around the building and all the gutters drain there. This is not be best RF ground, but for the purposes of this antenna, it should work fine. I used about 28 feet of left over #12 stranded wire from the ground rod up to the balun box and connected it to the common ground point inside the box.
The frame itself is mounted on a standard wall mount antenna pole. Stainless steel clamps hold the wood frame to the pole.
Once it was installed, I used my Kenwood R-2000 receiver to find the best mounting azimuth and locked everything down. I also put a toroid on the RG-6 coax coming up from the rack room to keep any shield noise from getting into the antenna.
AM receive loop PVC wire spacers
AM receive loop wood frame
AM receive loop balun transformer
The tuning capacitor is in there too, behind one of the loop wires.
AM loop antenna installed on roof
Antenna installed. I did try substituting the 500 pF capacitor with a 220 resistor. The signal strength came up somewhat, but the noise increased more, therefore the capacitor is a good termination for this antenna.
With this antenna, the signal from WABC is nice and clean and sound good on the FM station when a monthly EAS test is retransmitted.
An oldie, but a goodie, February 20, 1971, WOWO gets a EAN via AP teletype and follows procedure:
Back in the days of EBS, there were weekly closed circuit tests via AP and UPI teletype. In the event of a real Emergency Action Notification (EAN) there was a red envelope that contained a set of code words for each month. The test code words were on the outside of the envelope. If a EAN was received, the envelope would be torn open and the actual code words would be matched against the code words in the message. If it were authenticated, then the station would do just what WOWO did right then, send the two tone EBS alert for 25 seconds and break into programming.
It is amazing that this did not happen more often, especially on a Saturday morning with some a sleepy Airman in Colorado pulling the wrong message tape off the rack at the message center responsible for the whole system.
It has happened more recently when an EAS message was sent to evacuate the entire state of Connecticut. A EAN was sent in Chicago warning of a national attack when state officials were testing their new system. I am sure that others have been sent as well.
I suppose the emergency notification has always left something to be desired.
Since the FCC started the CAP clock ticking on September 30th, there has be a flurry of activity regarding the manufacture and installation of CAP equipment. CAP is integrated into something called IPAWS, which stands for Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. In other words, CAP is the vehicle that IPAWS uses to get information broadcast through radio, TV, Cable systems, etc. IPAWS encompasses all alert types include cellphone, texting, e-mail, and land line phone calling. Many states, including New York State, already do this. FEMA spells out the reason for IPAWS:
The advent of new media has brought a dramatic shift in the way the public consumes information. IPAWS, as the next generation emergency alert and warning system, capitalizes on multiple electronic media outlets to ensure that the public receives life-saving information during a time of national emergency.
Historically, the public depended exclusively on radio and television to receive alerts, but current research shows that the reach of radio and TV is less than 40% of the populace during the work day. While less than 12% of the population is watching TV in the middle of the night, an even smaller number is tuned into the radio, at 5% of the populace. Television and radio will continue to be valuable sources of public information, but their reach is decreasing. Further, these information sources can only target a state or regional sized area and do not encompass alerting for people who do not speak English or those with disabilities, including the 29 million suffering from hearing impairment.
Today, the internet, including video and email, and cellular and residential phones are increasingly popular and therefore, valuable, sources of information. One study showed that the Internet has a 62% usage rate, averaging at 108 minutes a day. While television remains the most popular source for information, the Internet ranked either first or second at both work and home.
CAP figures into this by acting as a method to move data between IPAWS and EAS. The basic CAP converter polls a CAP server, somewhere, for messages. When a message for a geographic area is received, the CAP converter processes it and converts it to an EAS format, which is then sent via high level audio to the station’s EAS encoder decoder unit. The EAS unit receives the information and then has the final say (or station personnel, if the EAS unit is in manual) as to whether the EAS message gets transmitted.
FEMA will be setting up a national CAP server in the next month or so, expect an announcement from them in November. Each state can also set up a CAP server for state and local government use. This will be implemented on a state by state basis. Currently, there is no information on the New York State Emergency Management Office’s (NY SEMO) website, hopefully they are aware of all of this and will be updating there system shortly.
The CAP converters installed in individual stations will access the CAP servers via secure HTTP connections. They will also be able to download software updates from the manufactures via the same method.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
~1st amendment to the United States Constitution
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
~Benjamin Franklin
...radio was discovered, and not invented, and that these frequencies and principles were always in existence long before man was aware of them. Therefore, no one owns them. They are there as free as sunlight, which is a higher frequency form of the same energy.
~Alan Weiner
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers
~Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, Article 19
Open Mic