The only requirements I know of were back in the days of conelrad. Nothing now.
--
Gene Seibel
http://pad39a.com/gene/broadcast.html
Because I fly, I envy no one....


I noticed that the Clear Channel stations here in
Ann Arbor, both of them, 100% of the commercial FM stations* in Ann
Arbor, MI; were off the air for the entirety of the power outage. The
same was true for the CC FM station in Detroit that is on my pre-sets.
This shows how little they were ready to be of public service in time of
need. Something that should be pointed out and recorded for license
renewal time.

*excludes public radio/college radio and a religious station.

But I don't know--Are commercial FM stations required to be prepared for
emergencies like this? One would think that they should want to be
prepared, but is it a requirement?

In article , (Gene Seibel) wrote:

The only requirements I know of were back in the days of conelrad.
Nothing now.

Do you remember what the specific requirements were back in the days of
conelrad?


Regards,

John Byrns

In article , says...
In article , (Gene Seibel) wrote:

Do you remember what the specific requirements were back in the days of
conelrad?

If we're talking FM stations, I don't know for sure but I think the
FMers (what few there were) would have had to sign off. The
participating am stations all switched to one of two frequencies (1 high
or 1 low) theoretically to confuse enemy "signal tracers" from seeking
and destroying transmitters.
I must admit Conelrad was way before my time so I am speaking from
"book memory". I hit radio during EBS when the alerts were kill carrier
for 5 seconds, back on for 5, off for 5, then back on with a 1khz tone
(or at least I think that's how it went).

--
Paul Van House
(remove _removeme_ from mail address for e-mail replies)
Radio/TV Software on my home page
http://www.binxsoftware.com
Coming Soon: A Voice For You (Voiceovers, Liners, On-Hold Imaging)
http://www.avoiceforyou.com

"Paul Van House" wrote in message
...
In article , says...
In article , (Gene Seibel)
wrote:

Do you remember what the specific requirements were back in the days of
conelrad?

If we're talking FM stations, I don't know for sure but I think the
FMers (what few there were) would have had to sign off. The
participating am stations all switched to one of two frequencies (1 high
or 1 low) theoretically to confuse enemy "signal tracers" from seeking
and destroying transmitters.

640 and 1240. Local areas or markets had stations assigned to one of the
two, and they would cycle on or off to further confuse RDF usage of signals.

The entire national system was tested several times in the early 60's, with
nothing on any channel except 640 and 1240 for a half-hour around 11 AM on a
weekday.

I was just getting started in the business in 1970. I was working at a
station on 1260 kHz. The way I remember it, was that they were to go
to Conelrad 1240 in case of national emergency. They had been provided
with a government surplus generator, and were obligated to keep it
operational.
--
Gene Seibel
http://pad39a.com/gene/broadcast.html



In article , (Gene Seibel) wrote:

The only requirements I know of were back in the days of conelrad.
Nothing now.

Do you remember what the specific requirements were back in the days of
conelrad?


Regards,

John Byrns

On 21 Aug 2003 02:54:39 GMT, (John Byrns) wrote:

In article , (Gene Seibel) wrote:

The only requirements I know of were back in the days of conelrad.
Nothing now.

Do you remember what the specific requirements were back in the days of
conelrad?

In the 60 and 70s every transmitter I worked with had a crystal for
either 640 or 1240. As I recall there were serious requirements to be
part of the system. I think they were an underground studio, generator
at both studio and transmitter and a connection to a local, regional
or federal emergency feed to, I think, Civil Defense.

I don't remember what the testing procedure was because everyone would
have had to switch to their assigned emergency frequency. I'm just not
old enough to remember.

Rich

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I'm old enough to remember. At the class 1B clear channel station I
worked at our 10 kw auxiliary transmitter had a bunch of components that
had to be jumpered and/or added. We would test it into the dummy load
after we set it up on 1240. There was a large manual denoting the
changes that had to be made. There was also an area test where we would
get an alert from the Conelrad control point and we would have to set
the aux to 1240 and turn its control over the the control point and then
they would test for a half hour or so. On for 30-60 seconds and off for
3-4 minutes in a random pattern. I think this was the only exception to
the union contract that we could do anything except take meter readings
without a supervisor there. Of course we took about 100 meter readings
and then typed them into the official log every 1/2 hour.

Later at a EBS (what was it now CSPS??-1) main station we had a 35 kw
generator and 1500 gallons of diesel fuel, console, turntable, cart
machines, tape machines and at least 30 days of food at the transmitter
with walls 24 inches thick (8" block, 8" reinforced concrete, 8" block
sealed and air conditioned. We also had two way radios between us and
the State Police and the local County Sheriff/FEMA office. FCC (for
FEMA I believe) came out every so often to check out our EBS readiness.
Even the food and the other ends of the two way radios to be sure the
links worked. Everything was also (supposedly) protected from EMP.

I asked one day how much notice we would have to man the site in the
event of an attack and was told about 15 minutes and I said "Oh good!
It takes me 20 minutes to get there from the studios in an emergency".
The FEMA guy just shook his head and smiled.....


Rich Wood wrote:

On 21 Aug 2003 02:54:39 GMT, (John Byrns) wrote:



In article , (Gene Seibel) wrote:



The only requirements I know of were back in the days of conelrad.
Nothing now.


Do you remember what the specific requirements were back in the days of
conelrad?



In the 60 and 70s every transmitter I worked with had a crystal for
either 640 or 1240. As I recall there were serious requirements to be
part of the system. I think they were an underground studio, generator
at both studio and transmitter and a connection to a local, regional
or federal emergency feed to, I think, Civil Defense.

I don't remember what the testing procedure was because everyone would
have had to switch to their assigned emergency frequency. I'm just not
old enough to remember.

Rich





--------------010207050005070101080006
Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
html
head
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1"
title/title
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I'm old enough to remember.  At the class 1B clear channel station
I worked at our 10 kw auxiliary transmitter had a bunch of components that
had to be jumpered and/or added.  We would test it into the dummy load after
we set it up on 1240.  There was a large manual denoting the changes that
had to be made.  There was also an area test where we would get an alert
from the Conelrad control point and we would have to set the aux to 1240
and turn its control over the the control point and then they would test
for a half hour or so.  On for 30-60 seconds and off for 3-4 minutes in a
random pattern.  I think this was the only exception to the union contract
that we could do anything except take meter readings without a supervisor
there.  Of course we took about 100 meter readings and then typed them into
the official log every 1/2 hour.br
br
Later at a EBS (what was it now CSPS??-1) main station we had a 35 kw generator
and 1500 gallons of diesel fuel, console, turntable, cart machines, tape machines
and at least 30 days of food at the transmitter with walls 24 inches thick
(8" block, 8" reinforced concrete, 8" block sealed and air conditioned.  We
also had two way radios between us and the State Police and the local County
Sheriff/FEMA office.  FCC (for FEMA I believe) came out every so often to
check out our EBS readiness.  Even the food and the other ends of the two
way radios to be sure the links worked.  Everything was also (supposedly)
protected from EMP.  br
br
I asked one day how much notice we would have to man the site in the event
of an attack and was told about 15 minutes and I said "Oh good!  It takes
me 20 minutes to get there from the studios in an emergency".  The FEMA guy
just shook his head and smiled.....br
br
br
Rich Wood wrote:br
blockquote type="cite" "
pre wrap=""On 21 Aug 2003 02:54:39 GMT, a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" /a (John Byrns) wrote:

/pre
blockquote type="cite"
pre wrap=""In article a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" "<bi0u9 >/a, a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" /a (Gene Seibel) wrote:

/pre
blockquote type="cite"
pre wrap=""The only requirements I know of were back in the days of conelrad.
Nothing now.
/pre
/blockquote
pre wrap=""Do you remember what the specific requirements were back in the days of
conelrad?
/pre
/blockquote
pre wrap=""!----
In the 60 and 70s every transmitter I worked with had a crystal for
either 640 or 1240. As I recall there were serious requirements to be
part of the system. I think they were an underground studio, generator
at both studio and transmitter and a connection to a local, regional
or federal emergency feed to, I think, Civil Defense.

I don't remember what the testing procedure was because everyone would
have had to switch to their assigned emergency frequency. I'm just not
old enough to remember.

Rich

/pre
/blockquote
br
/body
/html

--------------010207050005070101080006--

This is a fascinating discussion. I remember when AM transistor radios
had the little triangles on the dial denoting 640 and 1240, but that's
as far back as my memory goes on the subject.
There is a station in Fayetteville NC (WFNC) on 640 centrally located
amidst several military bases. Does anybody know if this station had
some sort of central role with CONELRAD back in the day?
For that matter, did the heritage AMs currently on 640 or 1240 fulltime
have any history with it?

GTT



Charles Gustafson wrote:
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Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

I'm old enough to remember. At the class 1B clear channel station I
worked at our 10 kw auxiliary transmitter had a bunch of components that
had to be jumpered and/or added. We would test it into the dummy load
after we set it up on 1240. There was a large manual denoting the
changes that had to be made. There was also an area test where we would
get an alert from the Conelrad control point and we would have to set
the aux to 1240 and turn its control over the the control point and then
they would test for a half hour or so. On for 30-60 seconds and off for
3-4 minutes in a random pattern. I think this was the only exception to
the union contract that we could do anything except take meter readings
without a supervisor there. Of course we took about 100 meter readings
and then typed them into the official log every 1/2 hour.

Later at a EBS (what was it now CSPS??-1) main station we had a 35 kw
generator and 1500 gallons of diesel fuel, console, turntable, cart
machines, tape machines and at least 30 days of food at the transmitter
with walls 24 inches thick (8" block, 8" reinforced concrete, 8" block
sealed and air conditioned. We also had two way radios between us and
the State Police and the local County Sheriff/FEMA office. FCC (for
FEMA I believe) came out every so often to check out our EBS readiness.
Even the food and the other ends of the two way radios to be sure the
links worked. Everything was also (supposedly) protected from EMP.

I asked one day how much notice we would have to man the site in the
event of an attack and was told about 15 minutes and I said "Oh good!
It takes me 20 minutes to get there from the studios in an emergency".
The FEMA guy just shook his head and smiled.....