https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOjGmtw_zrI
Curiosity got the best of me, and I started searching for the siren and stopped about 5 minutes into it going "that's a big island with a number of bases... how the world will I ever find that stupid thing?"
Well I came across the video again and decided to give it another shot. The same thing happened, but before I said screw it I came across an area on the island that looked familiar. Hop into StreetView in Google Maps, and to my surprise I got lucky and just so happened to put the little man right in the same location as the video. It didn't take too long before I found the siren, and wouldn't you know it, it's indeed a Waves siren, a 600 watt one. Depending on the activation system it's either a 7106R or 8106R(IP). Even found the PA that was playing the music in the video!- 2017-06-11.png (1.74 MiB) Viewed 2780 times
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Now here's the fun part. In the video it sounded like either one or possibly two sirens were doing tone while a bunch were talking at the beginning and end of the video. The others seemed to be saying the same things. It struck me as odd when the one I found was the only WAVES siren showing on the map. A little more searching later and I came across a bunch of Whelen omnidirectional sirens. At this point I thinking "whelp they replaced their system of rather rare and odd sounding sirens with your standard Whelen. Typical." That didn't set very well with me, and it bugged me so much that my curiosity got the best of me again. I opened up Google Earth yesterday morning to see when those Whelens were installed and got yet another surprise. They were installed in around 2005, while the WAVES siren seems to have gone up in 2012. It's pretty clear that the Whelen's only were talking during the test. If you look at the controls of the sirens there appears to be another box installed above the main cabinet. I wouldn't be surprised if they're RTU's of sorts. It's a really odd way of doing this, since ideally you would think the Whelen's would do tone and voice, and they would be heard going off in alert in conjunction with the WAVES siren. Doesn't really add up to me, and in fact I'm starting to wonder if they either test with just one siren making tone to keep down on the confusion or the Whelen system failed to make tone when they were supposed to. Using the Whelen system as a dedicated PA system almost seems like a waste of money considering that their arrays are way more omni directional and get quite a bit more range, but the military is know for doing that big time, what for the tower mounted 2001's and $45000 2909s on Ft. Benning.
That's all folks.- 2017-06-11 (2).png (1.88 MiB) Viewed 2780 times
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