I've been in several forecast offices and usually the NWS transmitter just sits there, unattended and hums along with no one paying attention to it...
That is pretty much my experience, too. The first in my experience was at the NSSFC in Kansas City (60’s and 70’s); I believe it was the second station on the air. The transmit and 8-track cartridge tape racks were all local. They had to go in and manually erase/record tapes every hour or so for radar summaries, etc. But no one ever checked the electronics itself.
That was before any tone alerting days, and they would talk futuristically about a system where anyone could get a black box to plug in the wall and it would sit silently until the weather office would activate it. Good times, and it sat in a room across from the WSR-57 radar
The next was is Topeka, KS, but the local transmitter was a UHF link to a distant transmit site some 20-30 miles away. No more tapes by that time but I don’t know of any control or routine monitoring of the actual NWR signal. They had one staff member whose voice would routinely open weather radios!
For a brief period, during severe weather, a couple of the radar meteorologists would stretch the microphone cable down the hall to the green-screen (pre-Doppler) radar and give live, real/time weather radar updates and commentary. I think this was only for one or two seasons.
I hope no one minds the small history recitation.
As of early Sunday morning, with a blizzard affecting much of the state, this station is still cooking away on 162.375!!
