Scalvian Worldbuilding (Revised Edition)
- Thread starter Predice
- Start date
-
- Tags
- scalvia worldbuilding
Predice
TNPer
Emergency Broadcasting in Scalvia
Introduction
Emergency warning and broadcast systems are an important part of most countries’ emergency response. Information is a crucial component of survival that emergency broadcasting and warning systems can provide. The same is the case in Scalvia, which has operated a codified emergency broadcasting system of some sort since the 1950s.
CDBS: Beginnings
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Commonwealth Civil Defence Administration (CCDA) created the Civil Defence Broadcast Service or (CDBS) to be transmitted on 640 AM or 1240 AM. In the event of an attack, all Television stations would cease broadcasting, and all AM radio stations would broadcast on 640 or 1240 kHz on the AM band. The idea behind the CDBS was to allow for the Prime Minister (and the Government more broadly) to reach as many citizens as possible, as quickly as possible, in the event of a national emergency such as a nuclear attack. The system consisted of a number of commercial broadcast stations designated as “Primary Stations” as well as a larger number of subsidiary relay stations. Once the Primary Stations received an alert from the Government, they would transmit an activation signal consisting of shutting the transmitter off for five seconds, turning it back on for five seconds, shutting it off for five seconds again, and then transmitting a 1000 Hz tone for fifteen seconds. Upon receiving this signal, the relay stations would cease regular programming and switch their transmission to either 640 or 1240 AM and await further instructions. Any station not part of the system would shut down. Because back in those days, as today, there are many amateur radio stations in Scalvia, radio amateurs could purchase a CDBS detection unit from companies like Radisson which would connect to their transmitter and upon receiving the CDBS activation signal, the unit would automatically cut power to the transmitter.
Upon the system’s activation, the Government could broadcast news, official instructions and information to anyone who could tune into those stations. So to ensure that as many people had access to the system as possible, all radios sold commercially in Scalvia from 1954 to 1965 were required to in some way specially mark 640 and 1240 AM, usually this was done by a triangle and circle.
CDBS marked car radio
Radio dial with CDBS marking
Another major component of the CDBS was a system that switched their broadcast duties between different stations in sequential order in order to avoid creating a homing beacon for enemy nuclear bombers.
All of this sounds pretty simple and straightforward in theory, but in practice the CDBS had serious flaws.
CDBS: Flaws
The CDBS experienced two pretty embarrassing false alarms in 1956 and 1958 respectively. The first of these was triggered on July 18th, 1956 when a Scalvian Air Defence Radar Station in northern Leišmale detected what they believed to be a formation of Suavidici Bombers. The Air Defence Command, Northern Division raised the alarm and attempted to activate the CDBS system. The result? Utter chaos. As it turned out, most participant stations were either not trained very well, or were so out of practice that they had absolutely no clue what to do. Most of them failed to respond, not ceasing to broadcast, nor switching over to one of the designated frequencies. Only around a fifth of the system actually activated, and the whole alert was called off after about ten minutes when it was determined that the incoming contacts were not actually Suavidici bombers, but instead Scalvian bombers carrying out a routine training flight.
The second false alarm occurred on January 6th, 1958, and was triggered by a miscommunication. The Air Defence Command (ADC) was attempting to send a routine communications check signal, but instead of sending the correct signal “This is an Air Defence Line Check,” they instead sent “This is an Air Defence Radio Alert.”
This caused WKIV in Kariste to activate the CDBS system. In a “shocking” development, most of the relay stations once again had no idea what to do with the alert, and only a small number went through the procedure properly. It was an embarrassment. Another major flaw, and a pretty fundamental one, with the CDBS was the fact that you needed to know that there was an attack taking place in order to tune to the CDBS frequencies. There was no way of reaching people who weren’t already tuned in or didn’t already know what was happening. The round-robin switching system that was supposed to prevent enemy bombers having a homing beacon to find their targets was also largely useless, as most stations were clustered around a small area, typically the Primary Stations, meaning that despite the switching, enemy bombers could still easily find large targets like cities. For these and many other reasons CDBS was finally phased out and replaced in 1965.
EADS: The clever yet flawed solution
Between 1958 and 1965, the Scalvian Government attempted to replace CDBS with the Emergency Alarm Distribution System (EADS,) a rather clever device that did not rely on radio reception to get its alert signal, but rather could be plugged directly into a regular household outlet and received its signal through the electrical mains by modulating the alternating current coming through it.
EADS plug-in repeater
Thus you didn’t actually have to be tuned in to receive a signal, you could receive an alert signal no matter what you were doing, so long as your home was receiving electricity. This was a major advantage over the CDBS but also proved to be its Achilles’ heel due to the fragility of the national electrical grid; the electricity could easily be knocked out by either a nuclear weapon detonating near electrical infrastructure, or by the electromagnetic pulse generated by a high altitude nuclear detonation. For these reasons and others, the EADS program was cancelled, and all units ordered destroyed on May 11th, 1965.
PAWS: Here for the long haul
On May 11th, 1965 the CDBS and EADS were replaced by the Public Alert and Warning System (PAWS.)
In many ways PAWS was very similar to CDBS, except that instead of designating specific frequencies for emergency broadcasts, the system took over the entire national broadcast network, and used the same frequencies that would normally be used to transmit regular commercial programming. Under this system, an alert could originate with the Air Defence Command (ADC) or the Commonwealth Civil Defence Administration (CCDA.)
The ADC or CCDA would transmit an Emergency Activation Notice (EAN) via News Agency wire services through teletype. This notice consisted of a series of X’s across the page and the teletype bell ringing a certain number of times, which would inform a broadcaster that an alert was forthcoming. A set of test authenticator words would then be sent out, with every broadcaster required to have a special envelope with codewords printed on the outside, and another set of codewords sealed inside of the envelope. The words on the outside of the envelope would then have to be compared to the ones being received by teletype, and if any one of them didn’t match, the envelope would have to be opened to compare the words inside and translate the message being relayed. All regular programming would then be terminated and the appropriate emergency message would be transmitted over the regular broadcast frequencies.
To avoid the complacency and lack of training that had plagued the CDBS, broadcasters were required to conduct a test of the Public Alert and Warning System once per week during the hours of 07:30AM and local sunset. Most broadcasters (unsurprisingly) scheduled these tests during periods of low viewership to avoid annoying their viewers. Originally the activation signal that was broadcast out was the same as CDBS, so turning the transmitter off for five seconds, on for five seconds, off for five seconds and then broadcasting a 1000 Hz tone for fifteen seconds. Unfortunately, however, a lot of transmitters couldn’t take that kind of power cycling, and tended to just shut down. Thus, this procedure became known jokingly as the “PAWS stress test.”
Because knocking a bunch of the transmitters in your system offline is far from the optimal solution, this procedure was replaced by a new alert tone mixing the frequencies 853 and 960 Hz, specifically due to its unpleasantness to the human ear, now famously known as the “Attention Signal” in Scalvia, or infamously as the “PAWS Screech” which is still used in Scalvian Emergency Warning Systems today.
PAWS: A flawed system like CDBS
All of this seems very straightforward in theory, and a massive improvement over CDBS, however in practice PAWS also turned out to have some massive flaws, which were laid bare by a false alarm on April 18th, 1973, when a Government teletype operator mistakenly sent out the wrong codeword, specifically “Xylophone.” Because this did not match the words on the outside of the envelopes in the broadcast stations for that day, a lot of stations started the activation procedure for the PAWS. This alert lasted for nearly an hour, as the teletype operator kept screwing up the termination signal, as he kept writing in the wrong word. It took him five unsuccessful tries before he was finally able to shut the alert down. If that was it, then that would have been fine; it would have been a great test of PAWS, unfortunately as with CDBS, most of the stations were clueless as to what to do with this alert, and only around a quarter of the stations actually activated the PAWS as per the proper procedure. Not a great look. Following this, PAWS tests were temporarily suspended, not returning until two years later in March, 1975.
When PAWS returned, some significant changes had been made to the procedure.
First: the Emergency Activation Notices would be sent through the news desks of the various wire services, as well as the Government Information Office for vetting, introducing a one minute delay to the notice reaching the public; also in the original system there were two different messages, one for a more general alert and one for a specific alert. Because the specific alert was thought to cause far too much panic, only the general alert was retained.
Finally, government broadcast stations were ordered to keep the tapes with the authenticator words away from the transmitters to avoid a repeat of the 1973 incident.
Yet despite these improvements it was soon realised that not only was PAWS deeply flawed, but that it was also somewhat redundant, given developments in broadcast technology and culture.
Nonetheless, PAWS remained in service until January 1st, 2000 when it was replaced by the Scalvian Emergency Broadcasting System (SEBS.)
SEBS: The Modern Solution
SAME Receiver
SEBS is roughly similar to PAWS, except that it uses a system of digitally encoded headers, known as SAME or Specific Area Message Encoding, in order to route a message to a specific relevant area, being the first in the world to integrate this system. It is worth mentioning that it is illegal to broadcast these SAME Headers unless there is an actual emergency. SAME means the system can be used not only for national level emergencies (like nuclear war) but also for local emergencies and natural disasters. The system comprises 58 Primary Stations, also known as Primary Entry Points (PEPs) scattered across the country, which can be used to transmit both local and national emergency alerts, which are triggered by the various SAME headers, the most serious of which is the Emergency Action Notification or the National Emergency Message (EAN and NEM respectively,) which indicates that the President or PM will speak to the nation within ten minutes. It can be deactivated in one of two ways; one is the End of Message (EOM) which allows the station to stop broadcasting the message, but crucially does not allow for a return to regular programming, instead requiring the station to wait for further instructions. The other way is by transmitting the Emergency Action Termination (EAT) or National Emergency Termination (NET) which allows the station to return to regular programming.
In 2010, SEBS was integrated into the wider SCALERT system. The SCALERT (Scalvian Alert System) includes not only SEBS, but also the National Warning System (NWS,) essentially a thousand phone party line connecting state emergency operations centres, and National Weather Service field offices, which allows alerts on severe weather events and other natural disasters to be quickly and efficiently transmitted, in addition it includes the Public Siren System (PSS,) a system of thousands of public siren systems, it also includes the National Weather Service All Hazards Weather Radio, and finally SCALERT includes the Wireless Emergency Warning System (WEWS,) which sends out national and local alerts via text message.
Conclusion
Scalvia was one of the first countries to seriously explore emergency broadcasting, and today has one of the most extensive emergency broadcast systems. Its SAME system allows for the rapid dissemination of information, and the use of the system for even local emergencies, making Scalvia’s SCALERT perhaps one of the most flexible public warning systems in Eras.
Introduction
Emergency warning and broadcast systems are an important part of most countries’ emergency response. Information is a crucial component of survival that emergency broadcasting and warning systems can provide. The same is the case in Scalvia, which has operated a codified emergency broadcasting system of some sort since the 1950s.
CDBS: Beginnings
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Commonwealth Civil Defence Administration (CCDA) created the Civil Defence Broadcast Service or (CDBS) to be transmitted on 640 AM or 1240 AM. In the event of an attack, all Television stations would cease broadcasting, and all AM radio stations would broadcast on 640 or 1240 kHz on the AM band. The idea behind the CDBS was to allow for the Prime Minister (and the Government more broadly) to reach as many citizens as possible, as quickly as possible, in the event of a national emergency such as a nuclear attack. The system consisted of a number of commercial broadcast stations designated as “Primary Stations” as well as a larger number of subsidiary relay stations. Once the Primary Stations received an alert from the Government, they would transmit an activation signal consisting of shutting the transmitter off for five seconds, turning it back on for five seconds, shutting it off for five seconds again, and then transmitting a 1000 Hz tone for fifteen seconds. Upon receiving this signal, the relay stations would cease regular programming and switch their transmission to either 640 or 1240 AM and await further instructions. Any station not part of the system would shut down. Because back in those days, as today, there are many amateur radio stations in Scalvia, radio amateurs could purchase a CDBS detection unit from companies like Radisson which would connect to their transmitter and upon receiving the CDBS activation signal, the unit would automatically cut power to the transmitter.
Upon the system’s activation, the Government could broadcast news, official instructions and information to anyone who could tune into those stations. So to ensure that as many people had access to the system as possible, all radios sold commercially in Scalvia from 1954 to 1965 were required to in some way specially mark 640 and 1240 AM, usually this was done by a triangle and circle.
CDBS marked car radio
Radio dial with CDBS marking
Another major component of the CDBS was a system that switched their broadcast duties between different stations in sequential order in order to avoid creating a homing beacon for enemy nuclear bombers.
All of this sounds pretty simple and straightforward in theory, but in practice the CDBS had serious flaws.
CDBS: Flaws
The CDBS experienced two pretty embarrassing false alarms in 1956 and 1958 respectively. The first of these was triggered on July 18th, 1956 when a Scalvian Air Defence Radar Station in northern Leišmale detected what they believed to be a formation of Suavidici Bombers. The Air Defence Command, Northern Division raised the alarm and attempted to activate the CDBS system. The result? Utter chaos. As it turned out, most participant stations were either not trained very well, or were so out of practice that they had absolutely no clue what to do. Most of them failed to respond, not ceasing to broadcast, nor switching over to one of the designated frequencies. Only around a fifth of the system actually activated, and the whole alert was called off after about ten minutes when it was determined that the incoming contacts were not actually Suavidici bombers, but instead Scalvian bombers carrying out a routine training flight.
The second false alarm occurred on January 6th, 1958, and was triggered by a miscommunication. The Air Defence Command (ADC) was attempting to send a routine communications check signal, but instead of sending the correct signal “This is an Air Defence Line Check,” they instead sent “This is an Air Defence Radio Alert.”
This caused WKIV in Kariste to activate the CDBS system. In a “shocking” development, most of the relay stations once again had no idea what to do with the alert, and only a small number went through the procedure properly. It was an embarrassment. Another major flaw, and a pretty fundamental one, with the CDBS was the fact that you needed to know that there was an attack taking place in order to tune to the CDBS frequencies. There was no way of reaching people who weren’t already tuned in or didn’t already know what was happening. The round-robin switching system that was supposed to prevent enemy bombers having a homing beacon to find their targets was also largely useless, as most stations were clustered around a small area, typically the Primary Stations, meaning that despite the switching, enemy bombers could still easily find large targets like cities. For these and many other reasons CDBS was finally phased out and replaced in 1965.
EADS: The clever yet flawed solution
Between 1958 and 1965, the Scalvian Government attempted to replace CDBS with the Emergency Alarm Distribution System (EADS,) a rather clever device that did not rely on radio reception to get its alert signal, but rather could be plugged directly into a regular household outlet and received its signal through the electrical mains by modulating the alternating current coming through it.
EADS plug-in repeater
Thus you didn’t actually have to be tuned in to receive a signal, you could receive an alert signal no matter what you were doing, so long as your home was receiving electricity. This was a major advantage over the CDBS but also proved to be its Achilles’ heel due to the fragility of the national electrical grid; the electricity could easily be knocked out by either a nuclear weapon detonating near electrical infrastructure, or by the electromagnetic pulse generated by a high altitude nuclear detonation. For these reasons and others, the EADS program was cancelled, and all units ordered destroyed on May 11th, 1965.
PAWS: Here for the long haul
On May 11th, 1965 the CDBS and EADS were replaced by the Public Alert and Warning System (PAWS.)
In many ways PAWS was very similar to CDBS, except that instead of designating specific frequencies for emergency broadcasts, the system took over the entire national broadcast network, and used the same frequencies that would normally be used to transmit regular commercial programming. Under this system, an alert could originate with the Air Defence Command (ADC) or the Commonwealth Civil Defence Administration (CCDA.)
The ADC or CCDA would transmit an Emergency Activation Notice (EAN) via News Agency wire services through teletype. This notice consisted of a series of X’s across the page and the teletype bell ringing a certain number of times, which would inform a broadcaster that an alert was forthcoming. A set of test authenticator words would then be sent out, with every broadcaster required to have a special envelope with codewords printed on the outside, and another set of codewords sealed inside of the envelope. The words on the outside of the envelope would then have to be compared to the ones being received by teletype, and if any one of them didn’t match, the envelope would have to be opened to compare the words inside and translate the message being relayed. All regular programming would then be terminated and the appropriate emergency message would be transmitted over the regular broadcast frequencies.
To avoid the complacency and lack of training that had plagued the CDBS, broadcasters were required to conduct a test of the Public Alert and Warning System once per week during the hours of 07:30AM and local sunset. Most broadcasters (unsurprisingly) scheduled these tests during periods of low viewership to avoid annoying their viewers. Originally the activation signal that was broadcast out was the same as CDBS, so turning the transmitter off for five seconds, on for five seconds, off for five seconds and then broadcasting a 1000 Hz tone for fifteen seconds. Unfortunately, however, a lot of transmitters couldn’t take that kind of power cycling, and tended to just shut down. Thus, this procedure became known jokingly as the “PAWS stress test.”
Because knocking a bunch of the transmitters in your system offline is far from the optimal solution, this procedure was replaced by a new alert tone mixing the frequencies 853 and 960 Hz, specifically due to its unpleasantness to the human ear, now famously known as the “Attention Signal” in Scalvia, or infamously as the “PAWS Screech” which is still used in Scalvian Emergency Warning Systems today.
PAWS: A flawed system like CDBS
All of this seems very straightforward in theory, and a massive improvement over CDBS, however in practice PAWS also turned out to have some massive flaws, which were laid bare by a false alarm on April 18th, 1973, when a Government teletype operator mistakenly sent out the wrong codeword, specifically “Xylophone.” Because this did not match the words on the outside of the envelopes in the broadcast stations for that day, a lot of stations started the activation procedure for the PAWS. This alert lasted for nearly an hour, as the teletype operator kept screwing up the termination signal, as he kept writing in the wrong word. It took him five unsuccessful tries before he was finally able to shut the alert down. If that was it, then that would have been fine; it would have been a great test of PAWS, unfortunately as with CDBS, most of the stations were clueless as to what to do with this alert, and only around a quarter of the stations actually activated the PAWS as per the proper procedure. Not a great look. Following this, PAWS tests were temporarily suspended, not returning until two years later in March, 1975.
When PAWS returned, some significant changes had been made to the procedure.
First: the Emergency Activation Notices would be sent through the news desks of the various wire services, as well as the Government Information Office for vetting, introducing a one minute delay to the notice reaching the public; also in the original system there were two different messages, one for a more general alert and one for a specific alert. Because the specific alert was thought to cause far too much panic, only the general alert was retained.
Finally, government broadcast stations were ordered to keep the tapes with the authenticator words away from the transmitters to avoid a repeat of the 1973 incident.
Yet despite these improvements it was soon realised that not only was PAWS deeply flawed, but that it was also somewhat redundant, given developments in broadcast technology and culture.
Nonetheless, PAWS remained in service until January 1st, 2000 when it was replaced by the Scalvian Emergency Broadcasting System (SEBS.)
SEBS: The Modern Solution
SAME Receiver
SEBS is roughly similar to PAWS, except that it uses a system of digitally encoded headers, known as SAME or Specific Area Message Encoding, in order to route a message to a specific relevant area, being the first in the world to integrate this system. It is worth mentioning that it is illegal to broadcast these SAME Headers unless there is an actual emergency. SAME means the system can be used not only for national level emergencies (like nuclear war) but also for local emergencies and natural disasters. The system comprises 58 Primary Stations, also known as Primary Entry Points (PEPs) scattered across the country, which can be used to transmit both local and national emergency alerts, which are triggered by the various SAME headers, the most serious of which is the Emergency Action Notification or the National Emergency Message (EAN and NEM respectively,) which indicates that the President or PM will speak to the nation within ten minutes. It can be deactivated in one of two ways; one is the End of Message (EOM) which allows the station to stop broadcasting the message, but crucially does not allow for a return to regular programming, instead requiring the station to wait for further instructions. The other way is by transmitting the Emergency Action Termination (EAT) or National Emergency Termination (NET) which allows the station to return to regular programming.
In 2010, SEBS was integrated into the wider SCALERT system. The SCALERT (Scalvian Alert System) includes not only SEBS, but also the National Warning System (NWS,) essentially a thousand phone party line connecting state emergency operations centres, and National Weather Service field offices, which allows alerts on severe weather events and other natural disasters to be quickly and efficiently transmitted, in addition it includes the Public Siren System (PSS,) a system of thousands of public siren systems, it also includes the National Weather Service All Hazards Weather Radio, and finally SCALERT includes the Wireless Emergency Warning System (WEWS,) which sends out national and local alerts via text message.
Conclusion
Scalvia was one of the first countries to seriously explore emergency broadcasting, and today has one of the most extensive emergency broadcast systems. Its SAME system allows for the rapid dissemination of information, and the use of the system for even local emergencies, making Scalvia’s SCALERT perhaps one of the most flexible public warning systems in Eras.
Last edited: