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Why are some of the civil defense messages of such poor audio quality? Particularly the severe weather announcements. It sounds like they're broadcasting from a sinking ship in forty foot seas. Definitely adds to the drama, but...
One might think that the one time you should get messages in crystal clear hi-fi quality, it would be in civil defense messages. But I guess not.
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For the human-read ones, sometimes the people that are sending them have no idea that they are being rebroadcast on every radio, television and cable station in the state. They think they're talking on a two-way radio to emergency management employees and fire fighters.
If there's a lot of static on top of text-to-speech, that's often at the station's side, when rebroadcasting NOAA Weather Radio.
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I think it'd be nice if they could find a way to confine their TV alerts to the areas in jeopardy. I can turn on the captions pretty quickly with my Samsung TV if there's dialog, but the other day I was here on the Big Island watching a musical performance/interview broadcast with John Cruz and an alert for Kauai interrupted at a crucial moment—annoying, and these alerts seem to crawl at an excruciatingly slow pace.
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quote:
Originally posted by seekir
an alert for Kauai interrupted at a crucial moment
Yeah, in 2019 that should never happen. When you receive an EAS alert that is not local, it's done as a cost-cutting measure to meet the absolute minimum of the law. A complete EAS system for TV/radio is about $3000 +/-. A drop in the bucket for a huge corporate broadcaster.
You can sometimes hear EAS alerts and tests from Kentucky, Oregon and Idaho in Hilo on some of the mega-church low power stations.
I've set up EAS boxes in Hawaii and Seattle-- it's amazing how much more advanced and localized the system is in Seattle (with great sound quality).
