Americans: be prepared for your cell phone to scream Wednesday at about 2:20pm EDT

[thewayne]

FEMA is going to be broadcasting an emergency alert test to every cell phone in the USA. I have no idea if this will bleed over to Canada or Mexico, hopefully it won't. I expect it to be kind of annoying, I should put an alert on my phone to go silent for 10-15 minutes around that time tomorrow.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/emergency-alert-test-october-4-2023-fema-fcc-cellphones-tvs-radios/

Comments

[murakozi]

I may be mistaken, but I think those emergency broadcasts override silent/do-not-disturb settings.

[thewayne]

Hard to say.  I have a "Absolutely DND" that overrides all alerts when my phone is silent, we'll see how it does tomorrow.

[acelightning73]

ONe of these days recently when there was heavy rain, flooding, and wind, I got a garbled text message warning me of some kind of emergency; since I didn't undertstand it, I ignored it.

My area has a "reverse 911 feature" you can opt into to get text messages about emergencies. Since Superstorm Sandy damaged half of my house and ruined furniture, carpeting, and books that were on lower bookshelves, I signed up for the warnings. I just got one now - there's a water main break being repaired on one of the main streets in this town, and it's the street I'd take to get to leave this town. I was about to forward it to my husband, who is out shopping for batteries for our motion-triggered path lights (the feral cats like to walk around and watch the lights come on. The pet cat we had, who was named Loki, used to rub up against a touch-activated lamp to do the same thing. A bored cat is more mischief than a bored teenager.

[acelightning73]

The current arrangement of emergency messages replaced the old CONELRAD "Civil Defense" stations, that you would be advised to tune your radio to those frequencies to hear the message. They were intended to be air-raid-warnings - note how we're always perfectly prepared to fight the PREVIOUS war. My town, being right on the shore of Raritan Bay, sends out messages when there are coastal flood warning and other weather threats. Sometime in July, we got a "tornado watch" here, the actual "warning" area was ten miles away. I watch a lot of storm-chaser YouTubes, my favorite is Pecos Hank. Observing their findings, it appears to me as if "Tornado Alley' has tilted eastward, so its northeasternmost end can wind up in New Jersey. Now, I've always wanted to see one in real life, but not THAT CLOSE.

Tornadoes seem to behave as if they were living creatures with volition. My son says it's just "air elementals having fun", but I don't think so; I'm generally good at detecting sentience in machines and animals. Yes, some weather does seem to be doing stuff on purpose. But I've been part of a group of wedding guests who tried to convince a thunderstorm not to do its thing right above where we're trying to have an outdoor ritual. It gave the impression of a bratty little kid - 'Put down that brick." 'No. Donwanna.' "Put it down right now, or I won't let you watch the Baby Shark video until tomorrow." 'Oh. Okay' (drops brick in the noisiest possible way)

[disneydream06]

Well, normally I would be in bed and not worry about it, but my sleep is here and there at the moment.

Can you imagine the noise that's going to arise later today with all those phones blaring away. LOL........
Hugs, Jon

[acelightning73]

My phone made an extremely rude noise at 2:17 PM, and the explanatory text message was reasonably informative. My husband was out, so his phone went off while he was in the optometrist's waiting room, not when it was next to his side of the bed. Mine was next to my side of the bed, which is where it stays when I'm not wearing it on a lanyard around my neck (stuffed into a t-shirt pocket so it doesn't bounce around). I'm going to email an old friend of mine who still works in radio and ask him if he knows anything about this new alert system.

CONELRAD was invented by "sex bomb" actress Hedy LaMarr. It's a system of frequency switching. In World War 2, it was discovered that any large city had powerful radio beacons that could lead a bomber group directly to the city, in the form of all the AM radio transmitter located near cities. That's why you had to tune to a particular frequency for CONELRAD - all radio stations were required to be able to transmit on that frequency. And the audio would get switched from one transmitter to another at random intervals, so that homing in on one signal wouldn't lead you to the target. Variations on this principle are used for cell phone bandwidth and other arcana. (And that's why it took so long for FM radio to catch on.)

[silveradept]

On time and on target. Two messages, one in English, one in Spanish.

[acelightning73]

I didn't get the Spanish version. Although I speak and read Spanish perfectly well. Probably because my phone defaults to English as its primary language.

[silveradept]

Mine, too, but I live in a region where there are enough primary or monolingual Spanish speakers that the message makes sense to have been sent twice.

[acelightning73]

I can see the skyline of Manhattan (which is clearly bilingual) from my upstairs window. So how come I didn't get the Spanish message?

[silveradept]

I have no answer for that. It certainly sounds like you should have gotten one.