[EAS] [BC] What's the point of LP-1s anymore?

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

We can look at the LP-1 in a couple of different ways, I think.  One is as a relay, a range-extender.  Another is as a key station that reliably will carry an alert (and maybe even relevant news and info thereafter).

I mentioned the Virgin Islands earlier.  In 1995 FEMA set up a mini-studio in its Joint Information Center on St Thomas with an STL over to the LP-1.  From there we syndicated a series of hourly five-minute "Recovery Radio" info-casts each morning.  Stations down on St Croix picked it off their EAS boxes.  We knew it was working when we learned that one St Croix station was selling adjacencies at premium prices.

Other stations on St Thomas started carrying us spontaneously as they came back on the air, which was gratifying but didn't really increase our reach. It was more a community-spirit thing than anything else, I think.   But the path over to St Croix, forty miles to the south, would have been hard to replicate.

Grand Forks ND was different.  We started by setting up an alternate studio (and transmitter) for the UND FM station, which gave us an over-the-air feed to the other locals, including the LP-1, which wasn't particularly activist.  Having already had some satellite time booked by some forward-leaning sorts back at HQ, we started doing a camera-in-the-studio treatment of Recovery Radio, which we flogged to local stations all over the 14-state area over which most of Grand Fork's population had dispersed.  We got a lot of positive feedback from the members of the diaspora for giving them a window into how things were going back home, but it was quite expensive.

Again, that was mostly about the longer-form stuff needed after the initial alert.  Still, it was nice to be able to construct a regional network on the fly.  In the local market, as soon as we had one station where folks knew they could get the info, getting it onto additional stations was less urgent to us.  Even so, eventually the LP-1 set up  temporary studios at the JIC, which fortunately was located in the University's rather spacious media center, right at the edge of the flooded area.

Art