EAS - Take a Giant Step "Back to the Future"

The national EAS test has come and gone. I’ve been through about 400 or so posts about what went right (the event did happen, it brought the tech community a lot closer together and spotlighted the common goal of success, a majority of decoders did trigger, there was no Mercury Theater of the Air panic by the citizenry and no actual attacks were initiated during the test period) and what went wrong (missed relays - including an entire state, daisy chains that looped back on themselves, cable and over-the-air test info either duplicated or non-existent, dropped audio, poor audio, reverb/echo/feedback audio and a few others).

The recommendations for moving forward are coming from every direction:

• Scrap the whole system and start over

• Keep the system as-is, the test went well

• Modify the system to (place your favorite verb here) and then ____ (about 50 different ideas)

• Make it smartphone-centric

• Make it satellite-centric

• Make it Internet-centric

• Increase the number of PEP’s

• Decrease the number of PEP’s

• Run more frequent national tests

• Take it away from the government

• Turn it all over to the government

After fielding calls from a number of clients – before, during and after the test – it becomes abundantly clear that KISS (keep it simple, stupid) was made for this.

First, stop and think of what the test was about. This wasn’t CAP. It wasn’t a series of chlorine tank cars on their sides in Omaha or Denver. It was national. It was to see how the system works when there’s an emergency that affects the entire country. That’s it. It sought the answer to a simple question: Can the POTUS (or his/her designate) get a message to all of us in case of emergency. This message may take 30 seconds or it could continue for days or even weeks. After all, we don’t know what the emergency might be and/or what instructions need to be given or citizen actions need to take place.

So now think about KISS. We’re certainly not doing that. The relays and daisy chains work – to a degree – but they take time and every level is subject to error. If you know that you’re going to have a 5% error factor in every layer of relay, which is better: 10 layers or 2? Doh!

So how do you do that. Whew-boy. Here’s where I get pummeled for talking about that positive step backward…to AM radio. To AM being the platform for launching all national alerts.

I must be kidding, right? Well would a kidder go one step further and suggest reexamining 500 kilowatt operation. Now I must really be kidding. Nope. Here’s the thinking:

As was proposed years ago, many of the clears could operate at 500kW. Yes, some may have to directionalize to protect neighbors to the north and south. A few would have to protect one another. But with a little study, we could get to a .5 mv/m or at least 100uv/m coverage* of the entire country with few – very few – facilities. Fewer facilities means fewer mistakes. Remember, this is for national alerts. Yes, the “PEP’s” (not so primary anymore) would be involved and each station would be part of a chain, but with all stations monitoring the 500kw operators, there’s be only two – count ‘em, two – links. Not bad.

Now, a couple of other advantages:

Contrary to using satellites, the web, or cellular as the base platform, 500 kW transmitters with tube modulators and finals are much less susceptible to EMP. Many AM towers are some distance away from cities’ population centers…less likely to be affected by nuclear or EMP attacks (wow – this IS going backwards). In fact, the only real danger would be if an enemy attacked us with CFL light bulbs.

Now the forgotten selling point: give me a little wire, let me unwrap a 1N34A from its lead-foil package and attach it to a crystal headphone and I’m listening to AM. No discriminator, no limiter, no D/A converter, NO BATTERY. Now someone’s going to say that I need a tuned circuit – and offer to sell me a 365mmf variable – but, believe it or not, in many cases, one station will dominate, at least enough for communication to take place. Yeah, if you live in Itasca, IL, halfway between the WBBM and WGN towers, I don’t want to hear from you. Go buy yourself a ferrite loop and tuning cap. And don’t bring up preemphasis. It’s not a factor here. The words will get heard.

Heck, you could even go digital! CW that is. I just don’t want to be the telegraph operator if they direct cathode-key the final.

Your counter to that argument should be, “Wait, you said national emergency and that AM’s should be the primary platform.” That’s true. The recommendation is that the super power AM’s provide the initial link. So the entire discussion of individuals and their 1N34a’s shouldn’t apply. Well, take the whole emergency thing one step further. It’s an actual emergency. EMP or other types of non-ionizing or, worse, ionizing radiation has limited or prevented travel while, at the same time, wiping out all those MOSFET gates, TWT’s, and maybe even good old bipolar transistors. Let’s hope it never gets to that point but if it does and my local FM’s and lower power AM’s are off the air, I’d sure like to unwrap the lead from around that little gem, hook it up, and find out if it’s safe to drive the heck out of town.

OK, back to EAS. High power AM can work. Because it’s just simple. Now – why won’t it happen? The filings and counterfilings, suits and countersuits that will ensue as stations seek upgrades, the jealousy of owners locked out of a power increase because of an overlap, and the thinking that complex is better than simple. Or the thinking that complex employs more people than simple.

But remember, to reach the entire country, the fewer hops the better. And this one has just 1. That’s probably its downfall. The president communicates to the 500 kilowatters and everyone monitors them. Just doesn’t sound complex enough to work.

Then I think of DaVinci’s words, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” If you do a study of 1400’s Italian you find the translation actually means KISS.

*Important to note that man made noise certainly has impact here. Power lines, ignition noise and those great compact fluorescents will definitely be a problem. But then, there’s a lot of this country where power lines and ignition noise aren’t problems…and CFL’s can at least be turned off – if there’s any electricity at all.

The Amazing Transducer/Filter/Equalizer

So I sat listening to Siegfried Idyll and tracking the first horn part. Even amidst a swelling tutti section, I was able to hear every note. ‘Bout an hour later, Buddy Rich was cranking away on Big Swing Face. Love his bass kicks and, again, it’s pretty easy to pick them out, separating them from the bass part, the piano left hand and the bari sax.

Revisiting the “How do it know?” punch line of the Thermos® bottle, you have to ask, “How?”  After all, I’m talking about a pair of ears. That combination of membrane, bones, hair cells, nerves and brain interpretation that processes what we call sound.

Try this some time: Point a mic at a street corner and tell it to “pick out what the girl in the tank top is saying.” Good luck.

OK – so you cheat and use a hypercardioid mic to pick out what’s coming from her direction. But there’s plenty of noise. So you load up Adobe Audition and open the file. Now – tell Adobe, “Pick out what the girl in the tank top is saying.”


Guess what. We’re not there yet. Yes, you can open the equalizers – graphic and/or parametric or sample the noise and try to cancel it – items – items you have to operate…but think about the fact that ears do all that automatically and in real time. You decide you want to hear the lead guitar and that’s what you hear.

The craziest part is that these wild transducers inside our heads have a lot of problems. First, they’re nonlinear. It’s a good thing. If ears operated linearly, we’d be able to handle about 50dB (softest to loudest) before losing the ability to hear the sound or covering ears to relieve the pain. Yet, given a combination of mechanical operations including the outer hairs in cochlea, we get to around 120dB volume range. Remember that decibels are logs so 10dB higher = 10 times the level but 20dB higher is 100 times, and 30dB is 1000 times, etc. Woah, Bessie, pretty good range. In fact, better than a standard CD.

“But wait, there’s more!” as Billy May (a voice any ear could recognize) would say. In its nonlinearity, the ear is subject to intermodulation distortion. OK. I give. Either bring it down a notch or go away. No, it’s simple. When two tones hit an eardrum, additional frequencies can be created. Well – not created physically…if you were to use a mic to measure the tones, a spectrum analyzer would show only two tones…but the human ear (tin, golden and in between) will hear additional tones. For example, listen to a 500Hz tone. Then add a second tone – 600 Hz. Intermodulation products begin to form as the level of the 600Hz tone is increased. You will “hear” 1100Hz (600+500) and then 100Hz (600-500) and, possibly, 1600Hz (2x500 + 600) and 400Hz (2x500 – 600). There actually are nearly infinite “orders” of intermodulation products, of varying levels, depending upon the level of the original two tones.

So, imagine a full orchestra playing. All those notes impinging on ear drums. A lot of intermod going on…but our brain understands it. Listen closely and it’s there, but it doesn’t get in your way.

Think this is all bunk? One speaker company is working on a new way of transmitting audio: If you want to create a 50Hz tone in someone’s ear, just generate a 22,000Hz tone and a 22,050Hz tone. Both are above audible range but a number of people have ear drums which move at those frequencies and if they do, they’ll generate the intermod tone of 22,050 – 22,000 or 50Hz.

And if you want to experience intermodulation in its basest form, listen as two oboes tune. (Actually, the riddle asks, “How do you make two oboists play in tune?” “Shoot one.”) As they come close in frequency, you will hear a “beat” between the two. That beat will waver at the frequency equal to the difference in frequency between the two. So if the wavering (not one oboe’s vibrato but the beat between two oboes) is occurring at twice a second, the two are one-half Hertz off in frequency.

Then add harmonic distortion on top of that and you wonder how we hear anything beyond mumbling and the cacophony of a bad orchestra tuning up. Harmonic distortion occurs when the eardrum – or any of the other devices of the ear – begins to move at twice or three time the frequency exciting it. If a 1000Hz tone is played into a human ear, to varying degrees the ear will generate harmonics (2000, 3000, 4000Hz) along with the fundamental. These harmonics are only a percentage the loudness of the fundamental but they’re there. It’s why an oboe sounds a little brighter than its spectral print says it should.

If you’re still hanging in here, let’s jump to the ultimate insult to the ear – audio compression schemes. Digitizing an audio signal for a CD means sampling each channel 44.1 thousand times a second, giving each sample a 16 bit number (one for each channel) for each of those slices of a second, then recording each digital “number” representing the signal at that point in time. A lot of data…like 700MB for 74 minutes of music. Doesn’t take much to fill up an iPod.

So we get crafty. We analyze the music/speech/whatever. We look at human ear response curves, impulse response, fatigue and more. And we find that, wow. When there’s a loud note of a particular frequency, it tends to mask other information in a small sliver of the audio band on either side of it. We tell the recording program to toss out that other info. And it does.

And what do we get? Kind of a skeleton of the music. As you listen, you know it’s Stevie Ray Vaughan. But a rhythm guitar playing an e softly behind his much louder note will be dropped – discarded. And what does that mean? Well tell your ear to listen for the rhythm guitar when listening to the CD and you may well hear it. Tell your ear to listen for it in an MP3 and your ear will reach around and smack you, know that it can’t. It’s a trick because the note just ain’t there. The greater the compressing, the less music is left.

Yet millions of folks, most without realizing it, record in a compression mode, tossing notes into the drink without thought. mp3, wma and similar formats are very good at sending content to the great beyond but either the lack of knowledge or the desire to put every K-TEL recording ever made on their iPods drives them to give themselves less that quality listening experiences. And it seems that the younger the person is, the more intent they are on cramming the most onto their devices. And the saddest part there is that they’ll never be able to experience critical listening. The “critical” has been removed by a process that leaves only the boldest notes.

Noise to the rescue. Another part of listening surrendered. There’s more radio listening in cars than at home. Noise surrounds iPod listeners on the street or in a plane. That noise masks some of the other problems created by compression. So now, listening to compressed audio, masked by noise, I have an interesting experience. A good one? Not really. But it is interesting. And seldom will you find a place where there are low enough noise levels to actually experience and analyze the music. Besides, who wants that? You miss the phone ringing, your special “other” talking to you, or the announcement of the next stop on the Red Line.

About here is where I’m supposed to offer the solution. Well I don’t have one. With no one buying CD’s today (OK, not many or the industry’d be in a little better shape) there’s no one with the gear to listen critically. They’re stuck. Their kids are stuck. Instead, they get excited over separation – as if the fact that the bass is mixed far left and the vocal is mixed center is the major point of the music – or other effects. It’s just not the music anymore…because there aren’t any music listeners any more. Except me – and maybe you.

Voyager 1 Leaves the Solar System

What phenomenal technology! Launching a rocket carrying a spacecraft that would eventually leave our solar system, our galaxy…onward forever. Well, not quite. What we really want is for someone – something – to find it. After all, that was the goal of the Voyager program which launched two unmanned probes, Voyager 1 & Voyager 2 (pretty smart naming by NASA, eh?) in 1977.

They flew past their initial goal, studying Jupiter and Saturn, collecting data and images of the solar system, then kept on going. Now, in January of 2011, it’s exited the solar system altogether – onward in the general direction of the Ophiuchus constellation – that new 13th constellation that's messing up astrologers – where lies AC+79 3888. And it’ll be there in only about 40,000 years!

Celebrate. Pop the cork! Our technology is “out there.”

Now…what technology did we put inside the spacecraft? Only the highest. Especially the “identifier” aboard. We sent out an LP!

We're hoping the probe would someday be discovered/captured/otherwise-examined by extraterrestrials.

Check out the photo of this very expensive pressing. This was gold plating on a copper disc. It contained sounds representative of life on Earth and images of earthlings (laid down in analog). Also included were sound effects worthy of the old Pepper-Tanner recordings…birds, whales, and a variety of other animals, wind, thunder, surf and musical selections covering a number of cultures and times. 

I tried to make out details on the label - wouldn't it be ironic if it were Sony or Polygram?  Oops.  Back to the topic at hand.

There are greetings from Earth in over fifty languages and messages from then President Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim.

Interestingly, the record is recorded/encoded at 16 2/3 RPM (the 1970’s version of data compression.) There was compression – likely by reducing modulation to add additional groove space – to make room for 90 minutes of music and the 115 images

Smartly figuring that the finders of the record might not have a Shure or Benz Micro dealership nearby, the record was sent with cartridge and stylus. Further, written and symbolic instructions were included in the hopes that these extraterrestrials will “figure it out.”

And what will they figure out? Well, think about it.

“Hey, Glop, look what someone launched into space.”

“Yeah. Can’t believe it. And, from the pictures, it looks like we have to spin this thing then scratch this pointy thing against it to find out what’s in it.”

“Right. And how long has it been since we had anything that spun? A million years?”

“True enough. I mean, holy creator, these guys are really primitive. Things have to move to make sounds or pictures.”

“Oh, the farquar with it. I don’t care, do you?”

“Only if that disc says they’re close by.”

How far have we come in 40 years? What would we send today? DVD? Laptop complete with hard drive full of “Earth”? (And what battery will we send with that?).

To be fair, many very bright scientists contributed to the creation of this documentation of Earth. They employed the best methods of the time to convey us to the universe.  And it’s a bang-up idea…provided the discoverers aren’t a bunch of Jedis with very fast space ships!

So after looking back. let’s look forward. What would we be able to include in the spacecraft if we launched in 2077, instead. Progress. It’s a good thing.