Moving on past the argument on the increase in power and my old home week post above, I'm wondering something. Who was the first person to conceive of the NWS weather broadcast network? I can't imagine they could have imagined its widespread use for all hazard warnings (a replacement of the 1950's air raid sirens I used to hear being tested when I was a kid growing up in southern California) with SAME coding and the less than welcomed, automated voice.
Knowing how things go in the federal government and large corporations someone had to not only think this up, but also had to champion it for many years, perhaps a substantial part of their career. It is a far better system than the one it replaced, the air raid sirens and CONELRAD (sp?). The latter was a "system" whereby you were instructed to tune your AM radio to one of two frequencies, marked on all radios with a funky little triangle logo, for important civil defense type information. In reality it was a forerunner to the Emergency Broadcast System and relied on existing radio stations to turn to all news, all the time back before this became a "requirement" of broadcasting on AM as it seems it has become.
I suppose I should Google all of this, but won't as I'm not sure I have any more brain memory capacity for still more trivia.
