I do remember the CONELRAD tests.

	Radio and television stations would broadcast an
introductory message as to what was about to happen. The carrier
would go down for 15 seconds. Then, it would come back up for
another 15 seconds. It was down for yet another 15 seconds and
when it came back up, there was a 1 KHZ tone for maybe another
15 seconds. CONELRAD receivers had to detect the two drops in
carrier plus the tone and that initiated the CONELRAD condition.

	My father was a science teacher at a school in Tulsa,
Oklahoma at the time and had gone in to the teachers' lounge or
maybe the school office for something and turned on the radio.
He first thought the radio was broken because there were only
two signals on the air. Then, he was reminded of the test which
went for half an hour or so and then all other stations came
back on and things were normal.

	I think the test was done every year for a while. I
don't remember the first test, but the one in 1957 or 1958
featured a talk by our state's governor at the time. 

	I bet the station engineers loved this test if their
station was one of the CONELRAD stations because they had to run
all this stuff that you couldn't test any other time and it had
to work perfectly this one day and, of course, be ready to
switch in on a moment's notice.

	Tulsa had a 50,000-watt station KVOO at 1170 which was
one of the CONELRAD stations so they had to electrically chop
off part of their antenna to tune it up on 1240. I am sure this
was accomplished by large contactors which are just huge relays,
but still, when else could you make sure it worked?

	The other 50,000-watt station in Tulsa was KRMG at 740.
I have no idea, for sure if they were the 640 CONELRAD station,
but they would have had to add some electronic length to their
masts to reach 640.

	It did work, however, so it just shows you what people
do when they need to.

	Something else you might find interesting during those
days was a plan to use AM broadcast transmitters as data links
for RTTY and Morse.

	There was an article in "QST" several years ago about
WSM 650 in Nashville TN. They actually had a FSK encoder on
their 50-KW transmitter which shifted the carrier maybe 50 HZ
and would have let them send RTTY to suitable decoders. An
average citizen listening to WSM would have noticed nothing
unusual. The article described the test transmission as a loop
sending the call letters and the word "test."

Lloyd Rasmussen writes:
> I don't remember hearing any of those celebrity PSA's, but they aren't 
> very
> different from what FEMA tells us today at ready.gov or other websites.