WPAY Severe Weather Coverage

[RadioGeek]

What a train wreck the other night. Tara was on the air reading warnings and trying to explain what to do. It was horrible. I think the best part was when a tornado warning was issued for Lewis County, Kentucky she started screaming "Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!" followed by 5-10 seconds of silence. Thanks for the panic WPAY! Just let the EAS do the work next time.

[Hoosier Daddy]

Every significant EAS alert is an on air Comedy/Tragedy at that station.

Every. Single. One.

[Big Media]

Someone has to roll tape on this shit. That is funny.

[sportsvoice]

She is (or at least was) EAS coordinator for the south central portion of the state plan. Yikes...

Doesn't help that WPAY is probably the only receivable signal for that entire monitoring region. The LP2 used to be 93.3, but it was moved away to Columbus. They may have assigned 94.3 as LP2, but parts of the area can't get that signal. At one point I thought WKOV had LP3 but I could be wrong, and besides, its ownership is trying to move it away too.

If I was at one of the other stations in that region and had WPAY assigned for monitoring, I'd set my decoder up for the nearest NOAA frequency as well. Then set filters to dump everything except EAN, RMT, and Tornado or Flash Flood Warning (maybe pass Flood Warning or Severe Thunderstorm if heavily automated). Usually the NOAA transmitter fires the alert first, so it would go over EAS and then the box would dump subsequent alerts, so I could avoid having to pass alerts from WPAY unless they got it out first. That would avoid any foul ups (like them not sending the EOM tone and me becoming a large translator for a while...).

[RadioGeek]

I was going to roll on their coverage for giggles but they must have lost their STL feed because they were 100,000 watts of silence for quite some time. Never sounded better!

[Dr. Whiplash]

She is (or at least was) EAS coordinator for the south central portion of the state plan. Yikes...

Doesn't help that WPAY is probably the only receivable signal for that entire monitoring region. The LP2 used to be 93.3, but it was moved away to Columbus. They may have assigned 94.3 as LP2, but parts of the area can't get that signal. At one point I thought WKOV had LP3 but I could be wrong, and besides, its ownership is trying to move it away too.

If I was at one of the other stations in that region and had WPAY assigned for monitoring, I'd set my decoder up for the nearest NOAA frequency as well. Then set filters to dump everything except EAN, RMT, and Tornado or Flash Flood Warning (maybe pass Flood Warning or Severe Thunderstorm if heavily automated). Usually the NOAA transmitter fires the alert first, so it would go over EAS and then the box would dump subsequent alerts, so I could avoid having to pass alerts from WPAY unless they got it out first. That would avoid any foul ups (like them not sending the EOM tone and me becoming a large translator for a while...).

Good advice that. Several stations in the SEO EAS region (there, buddy) put NOAA first - not only is it faster but it's pretty reliable, as opposed to the kids in Athens...although Athens sounds like a smooth operation compared to the train wreck described by the Geek. The problems with WOUB (LP1) and WXTQ (LP2) are problems of omission, not panic attacks.

A friend at the NWS says they debated resetting the parameters for Severe Thunderstorm Warnings when their radars were upgraded because they were seeing more wind and hail...but the parameters stayed the same and "wolf" seems to get cried quite often. I'm with you, sportsvoice, filtering down to Flash Flood Warnings and Tornado Warnings on music stations. And maybe Tornado Watches.

Proud to hit post # 1000 bitching about EAS