Siren Systems Gone Haywire

[DJ2226]

For the last test of the year I stayed home to record the ambiance from our system in Columbus and the one in Ft. Benning with my camera, and I'm glad I did. There were a few abnormalities with this one that make me scratch my head.

First off Columbus's system starts off first instead of the base's. Usually it's the other way around, but no big deal. When the sirens get to talking I realized that for the most part all I heard was one siren running. Odd. That 2810 does the usual 1 minute of alert and 15 seconds of wail and air horn. It doesn't talk at the end, but again that's not so important. After it cancels out of air horn that's it; none of the others in Columbus's system were heard, and Ft. Benning's system sat silent.

Here's the interesting bit. About a minute passes(cut out of the video) and the base's sirens fire up out of the blue in air horn for the all clear. They never ran the "test" portion of the test with alert. Just before they finish the all clear sequence, out of nowhere I hear "This is a test. This is a test of the..." Columbus's system started testing again. This time the siren in the park misses the activation as a whole and never runs. After the others ran in alert for about 45 seconds they cancel out, but part of the way through the ramp down the tones for wail come though and everything abruptly switches to wail. The cancel goes out to the sirens, however one fails to receive them and continues to run. The tone for air horn are rushed out and abruptly switch the other sirens to air horn mid-ramp down. The one from before fails to receive the tones for air horn and the cancel afterwards and continued to go in wail for 3 minutes.

It seems to me that the DTMF tones to dial up the entire systems of 18 and 47 either got to the sirens in a hit and miss fashion or failed to go out entirely due to what seem to be radio issues. Ain't that something, storms are right around the corner and both Columbus and Ft. Benning have system breaking issues that result in the entire systems, just about, rendered useless. I swapped cameras in the middle of this to one of my iPhones, which just so happened to be charged with enough memory to catch the whole thing. By the way, the main 2810 heard in the beginning is at Belvedere Park a little over half a mile away, the other about 1.25 miles away on St. Marys Rd, and the base 2909s a little over 3 miles away.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_vapOI_nXo