GOP senate cantidate's radio ad forced on airwaves via EAS

[BR_Parkway]

this morning Monday, Nov. 6th at 10:02 am my radio station recieved an Emergency Alert System (EAS) test that came through with a radio advertisement for republican senate cantidate Dick Mountjoy coming on after the familiar "this concludes this test..." message.

EAS is a system where two or three stations per county are Local Primary (or LP) stations that iniciate system tests or actual warning messages in times of an emergeny such as a natural disaster. The alert is broadcast over their normal signal in the form of data tones followed by a voice or video message pertaining to the alert (or a voice saying "this has been a test.. etc). Radio stations are required to have an EAS unit that listens to these LP stations, and when an EAS broadcast comes through it interrupts the normal air feed to rebroadcast whatever is coming from the LP signal.

Upon further investigation we discovered that the message originated from local Clear Channel owned conservative talk radio station KFBK in Sacramento. We gave them a call inquiring about the incident and they admitted to broadcasting the message as a result of a "training snafu".

here is a link to a post on the SFGate blog about the incident

Essentially what happened is that they failed to transmit the termination code ending the EAS broadcast and thereby resuming our normal programming. Instead, they transmitted a few minutes of their own programming which contained the ad.

I dont think we can really prove that this was deliberate, but it seems like an awfully big coincidence for the ad to perfectly play out on "accident" on the day before elections.

here is an mp3 of the EAS transmission recorded from our broadcast
http://funkterminal.com/EAS.zip

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2160281

[AlCzervik]

1. i heard it yesterday and i was shocked, i called my local firehouse who also heard

it and they were pissed! this isn't over yet.

[havocmom]

2. It was deliberate, but proving that is another matter

After today is in the book, raise bloody hell about this. LTTE, letters and calls to FCC... get more people who heard it to raise a ruckus.

Come January, the new Speaker might wanna have someone look into licensing and violations of the rules for the public air ways! ;)