Also: The FCC document references the 18 Fox owned stations and says nothing about the 200+ affiliate stations. Are those stations culpable if they also broadcast Fox produced content that was in violation of EAS rules?
It’s not like those times that Hanes Underwear played the “brown noise” on AM radio. What a commute that was.
But I’m confident that FOX isn’t calculating the trade-off for a fine. I think they just had an advertising contractor who didn’t know any better. Thought it was a cool angle for an ad.
SAME BFSK uses frequencies iirc between 1 and 2 kHz, and the attention signal is an equal mix of 853 and 960 hertz.
Besides that, those would be filtered out on the transmitter end long before they were allowed to modulate the signal. Especially AM transmitters may do some pretty wild stuff when you drive them with frequencies that low, fair chance that you'll find that you hold them 'on' long enough that you're going to find the limits of either the power supply or the cooling system.
Both on the high end (5KHz and up in theory, but more like 3KHz in practice) and on the low end (100Hz in theory, but you can go as low as 50 Hz in practice).
So I highly doubt that story is true.
If there was evidence that the creators actually did a calculation to determine that the base fine of $144,000 was worth it, that’d be a nightmare for them
Why are they though?
Even a minute warning for things tornadoes etc can save lives, but this only works if people associated these sounds with significant issues and start paying attention.
Fine them to high heaven.
The false Hawaii missile warning comes to mind too.
Somewhat interesting is that I don't think they were used on 9/11.
According to what I can find, it's missing something called a SAME header that the tones are supposed to be prefixed by, maybe that's why FOX thought they could get away with it?
Edit: For clarification, the particular message that needs o be sent to be considered "Emergency Broadcast" is not just the "Attention signal", it's has many other vital parts (like the header in the message that it begins with). Besides that, the Attention Signal has to be at least 8 seconds long as long, otherwise I'm assuming it should be considered one. The one FOX broadcasted seems to have been ~3 seconds.
This makes sense because advertisers could misuse it to grab attention (exactly as Fox did) and cause people to start to ignore the sound due to false signals.
Just like it’s usually illegal to have lights and sirens on your car.
I’d be interested in the story of how this happened. How did no one say “that’s probably not a good idea”? Even without knowing the law existed?
Correct. CFR Title 17, Part 11 [1] specifies the technical and operational aspects of EAS. Section 45:
> No person may transmit or cause to transmit the EAS codes or Attention Signal, or a recording or simulation thereof, in any circumstance other than in an actual National, State or Local Area emergency or authorized test of the EAS. Broadcast station licensees should also refer to §73.1217 of this chapter.
[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2010-title47-vol1/pd...
I actually do use a ringtone composed of three SAME headers and the attention signal; specifically, I use that ringtone for PagerDuty. It reliably raises me from the dead in the correct state of mind to respond to an alert, and also reliably turns heads when it goes off while I'm out and about. But I don't need to worry that the FCC's gonna come after me about it, as long as I don't have my phone plugged into a radio station when it goes off.
That said, if I were doing a radio interview or something, I'd be sure to turn off my phone or at least remove PagerDuty's ability to override the silent switch.
So, not illegal in general, but illegal to transmit it on broadcast channel.
I would even bet that if you searched E-Bay long enough, you could find a 1950's-era vacuum tube AM radio with tone-squelch tuned to those tones so that you could leave the radio on and just hear the duck-and-cover message without the distraction of that nasty Rock-n-Roll music that the kids are all listening to.
The SAME header and footer are each repeated three times, and consist of BFSK-modulated data on a couple of frequencies I forget offhand. (If you're interested, they're specified in Section 31 of the regulation I linked elsewhere in this thread.) The header encodes the type and geographical applicability of the alert, and EAS receivers configured for the applicable area use it to automatically interrupt broadcast with the bulk of the alert. The SAME footer encodes no data but serves as an "end of message" flag; EAS receivers can use that to resume normal broadcast depending on configuration and the nature of the alert. (Sufficiently severe alerts may be repeated in entirety.)
CONELRAD didn't use any in-band signaling of this type, in any case. The technology wasn't really there for it, and in any case the whole point of the scheme was not to continue transmitting from any one station for a significant length of time, in order to deny Soviet bombers navigation references which would help them drop nuclear bombs on American cities.
The tones aren’t illegal. Misusing public emergency infrastructure is illegal.
There are two syllables in English such that if you shout them in sequence in a crowded theater in a non-emergency context, it is also a crime: fi-re.
Im fact the FCC mentions the affiliates several times. One example: “Therefore, we find FOX responsible for broadcasting the Promotional Segment containing the EAS Tones on 18 of its owned-and-operated broadcast stations, transmitting the Promotional Segment to 190 of its network-affiliated television broadcast stations, and causing the transmission of the Promotional Segment on Fox Sports Radio and the Fox Sports on XM channel.”
> Are those stations culpable if they also broadcast Fox produced content that was in violation of EAS rules?
Station licensees are responsible for the content they broadcast. In this case at least the FCC went after the content source, which is itself also a licensee.
The font also looks like the subtitles that some local teletex stations used to use. I wonder how much of that broadcast is teletex/subtitle aligned to work well.
If it had some smooth jazz with helvetica playing in the background I wouldn't take it seriously. That EAS font (to me a foreigner) screams "This isn't daytime television".