CONELRAD: The Ancient EAS System

thevalley1700am · 2011-02-03T06:48:43Z

Hi All, I was at work last night at my radio station job, was a little bored, and was watching mockup fake EAS videos on Youtube, and ran across this on Wikipedia: Hi All, I was at work last night at my radio station job, was a little bored, and was watching mockup fake EAS videos on Youtube, and ran across this on Wikipedia:CONELRAD, the now fossilized predecessor of the modern Emergency Alert System. I like how they marked the old time radios back then to help listeners find the stations that would rely alerts. From Wikipedia: CONELRAD had a simple system for alerting the public and other "downstream" stations, consisting of a sequence of shutting the station off for five seconds, returning to the air for five seconds, again shutting down for five seconds, and then transmitting a tone for 15 seconds. Key stations would be alerted directly. All other broadcast stations would monitor a designated station in their area. In the event of an emergency, all United States television and FM radio stations were required to stop broadcasting. Upon alert, most AM medium wave stations shut down. The stations that stayed on the air would transmit on either 640 or 1240 kHz. They would transmit for several minutes, and then go off the air and another station would take over on the same frequency in a "round robin" chain. This was to confuse enemy aircraft who might be navigating using Radio Direction Finding. By law, radio sets manufactured between 1953 and 1963 had these frequencies marked by the triangle-in-circle ("CD Mark") symbol of Civil Defense.[3] Even amateur HAM radio had to abide by CONELRAD's overlord like jurisdiction. If you are interested in more of this stuff, read the next article on The emergency broadcast system which was succeeded by The Emergency Alert System at the present era. I know that on my station at least you can program a PAL script in SAM broadcaster to relay amber alerts over the internet. As they say here in Baltimore, Have a good one! Geoff

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Anonymous

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In those days I always thought Conelrad sounded like "comrad," which is what Russians called each other.

It's very peculiar to think that there was a slight time difference between the speed of an attack and the speed of changing AM transmitter frequencies. I guess they eventually realized the plan might not work.

By the way, what's today's danger color?

I'll duck,
You cover.

Woops. We left AM 1700 turned on. Is that bad?

Posted : 08/02/2011 6:33 pm

Anonymous

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The two tones used were 853 Hz and 960 Hz, IIRC.

Posted : 10/02/2011 4:14 pm

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