[Milsurplus] Conelrad

[bill croghan]

	The truth of the False EBS alert back in the 70's is this.  Our
Canon City Colorado JC chapter had a Friday night party.  Two of us got a
little loaded and ended up calling in sick the next morning.  I was News
Director of the local AM radio station (KRLN) and got a call that really cut
through my hangover.  The real alert had come through.  It wasn't until the
next week I learned that the other guy who called in sick was the Civilian
employee of the NORAD combat operations center in Colorado Springs who
normally pulled the punched paper tape out of the safe and ran the regular
practice EBS alert each week.  His fill in, grabbed the wrong tape.  My
station did like most and ignored it, since it came down at the exact time
as the regular weekly test.  The joke was that the Russians would pick that
exact time to do an actual attack!
	The Conelrad system required all stations either to go off the air,
or if part of the program, change frequency to the 1240 or 640 frequencies.
Many  of the older transmitters had the dual oscillators and the better
engineers would do the retune in the middle of the night, and mark the
various coils etc in the transmitter, phasors and antenna tuning units so
that they could do it in a hurray if needed.  I don't think there ever was a
full scale test of all the stations at one time.  After that Conelrad
requirement was dropped, most of us used the second crystal position for a
spare crystal on our normal frequency.
	The "Conelrad Receivers" and later EBS receivers were nothing more
than conventional receivers with marks and/or relays that would activate on
a carrier interrupt.
	Today's modern EAS systems use the same techniques as the NWS SAME
weather alert systems.  A national committee I served on selected that for
future expansion.  We wanted to make the system work in as many receivers as
possible.  The system is expanded to include the AMBER alert system and a
lot of other things.  Recent changes have added the digital modes i.e. HD
fm, HD TV, Satellite Radio and cell phones to those of us required to do EAS
alerts.
	If you want to learn more about EAS, check out;
http://www.hallikainen.com/FccRules/2006/11/

Bill Croghan WB0KSW
Co-Chairman, Southern NV (Las Vegas) operational area 
Chief Engineer,
Lotus Broadcasting, Las Vegas
KOMP/KENO/KXPT/KBAD