The Siren Board

Echo, Federal [very likely] doesn't make the DSA. Its fairly obvious its something that can be bought and repurposed by anyone. Mysterious did a great job explaining that. They look the same because they are the same. Its just [likely] not Federal who makes them. Its someone else. I hope that makes sense.

To clarify a bit more: Its analogous to the Kingstar speakers. ATI uses them for the HPSS, ASC uses them for the E-Class. Neither makes them and neither buys off one another. Above, Mysterious made a fairly convincing argument that Atlas makes the DSA-style array (especially given that all it is is a stack of 100 watt speakers whose drivers are surrounded by a metal enclosure).

It is, at the end of the day, possible Federal sold manufactured DSAs to ATI where ATI slapped on its own components, but again, why would Federal sell to a competitor to then resell? I guess, in all fairness, there is some precedent as Alerting Solutions (the former Hormann American) sells UltraVoices hooked to Kingstar speakers for their systems. But Alerting Solutions seems like a very small operation and there's no telling if they do any kind of upselling on the UVs they buy.

And ATI guts are not stuffed inside failed MCPs. They were sold like that (hence why I brought up Nashville...all of Nashville's Kingstar ATI's had the MC(P)-style cabinet. Nashville did not buy 70+ failed MCs with ATI guts). Either ATI knocked off Federal's cabinet design or Federal and ATI subcontracted manufacture to the same entity.

So at the end of the day: ATI sold the DSA-style sirens as their [likely] first gen model. This is fact. There's no replacing anything Federal going on.

(and now I'm derailing my own thread. Oy vey--though I guess not if it helps us get to the bottom of ATI history which is what I wanted)

Has anyone here ever seen what kind of drivers their rotating sirens used?

uncommonsense wrote:I also did a little more digging I should have done earlier. The poster of the above video seems to later confirm there's Whelens at Bayer in the form of 2700s (though the OP seems confused about what they are; given there's a high pitched analog 864 whoop, I figure its probably a 2700).

Source:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2SnhS-btq8

I think they may be a VERY old WPS 28XXs, since the WPS 2700 sirens only went up to 6 (from what I've seen on some older posts and internet). Take a look at the way this one sounds:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3jR444FaDE
Sounds like an older ESC-864.

I think they may be a VERY old WPS 28XXs, since the WPS 2700 sirens only went up to 6 (from what I've seen on some older posts and internet). Take a look at the way this one sounds:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3jR444FaDE
Sounds like an older ESC-864.

Possibly, but keep in mind the geography of the area. Taylor Lake Village is about 15 miles away from the Bayer Refinery.



But to try and relate it back to the OP's topic, regardless of what Bayer has or what the old ATIs sounded like, Baytown did have ATIs (more than likely installed before 2003).

DJ2226 wrote:Has anyone here ever seen what kind of drivers their rotating sirens used?

2-400 watt drivers per horn (ex. the 2 horned model has 1600 watts of power, the 4 horned 3200 watts). I'd love to source it but you'll have to trust me. I found a document on the internet I don't think was supposed to be out there and it had a disassembled rotating ATI in it.

uncommonsence wrote:I've always figured Federal doesn't make the DSAs but buys them off someone else (Atlas?) and resells them. The DSA is such a simple design it would make sense.

I took a look at Atlas' website to see what I could find, and the horns on the DSA arrays look very similar to Atlas' CJ-46. Though, something seems to look different, the pictures and angle could be the reason though.
DSA (From Federal's Website)


CJ-46 (From Atlas' Website)

http://www.atlassound.com/Solutions/Pro ... CJ-46.html

Atlas does not have the wattage ratings for this speaker on the site nor can I find anything about prebuilt sets like the ones on the DSA's.

mrboojay wrote: I took a look at Atlas' website to see what I could find, and the horns on the DSA arrays look very similar to Atlas' CJ-46.

Mysterious T-Bolt 111 in his first post on this thread wrote:...CJ46 Arrays, being that Atlas...

It would have saved you time just to look at the second post of this thread. They're the same. Even this old WS-1000 ad states that the speaker look-alike is that model from that brand: http://www.michigancivildefense.com/ima ... et=tlx_new

Oh, sorry, I guess I should have.

uncommonsense wrote:

DJ2226 wrote:Has anyone here ever seen what kind of drivers their rotating sirens used?

2-400 watt drivers per horn (ex. the 2 horned model has 1600 watts of power, the 4 horned 3200 watts). I'd love to source it but you'll have to trust me. I found a document on the internet I don't think was supposed to be out there and it had a disassembled rotating ATI in it.

I'd like to see the document personally. Why would it not need to be posted? Is ATI afraid to show what's really inside their sirens?

Most siren manufacturers would really rather not have details of what's inside their sirens made public for the same reason that Kellogg's closed down the Battle Creek factory tour in the mid-1980s: Trade Secrets.

In Kellogg's case, they were updating the equipment used to make Corn Flakes and didn't want competitors to see the new process, which would allow them to duplicate it. In the case of sirens, the less detail there is out there of the inner workings of one, the harder it would be for someone to clone it and/or improve on it. You'll note that even on the wiring diagrams provided by Federal in the EOWS manual (the newest electronic one I've seen), there are large amounts of stuff that are simply referred to as a given component with a part number, usually in the form of microchips that have a lot of key circuitry embedded in them. The really interesting stuff (like the actual wiring diagrams of the chips themselves) is kept secret to protect proprietary knowledge.

Here we go. Here's a perfectly public document to back my point up: http://www.gamewell-fci.com/datasheets/gf12003.pdf

The Rotating Speaker Head includes, (8) 400W drivers, rotor assembly with DC motor and junction box, pole top mounting bracket, 50 ft. of speaker and rotation cables. Batteries and Antenna equipment sold separately.

The 2 horn model is the ATI R-HPSS16 and the 4 horn model is the R-HPSS32. So 2-400W drivers per horn = 8 drivers as listed.

All the ATI rotating assembly is two or four off the shelf compression horns connected to a [ramshackle] frame where each horn's audio is provided by 2-400 watt drivers. An example of the kind of horns they used is shown by this photo from Community Professional Loudspeaker, especially when you look at the PC-194 (NOTE: I'm not saying ATI used Community products or this exact horn design. Rather, I'm just giving an example of a horn design similar to what ATI used to provide an analogous visual): Who made 400 watt drivers suitable for ATI's purposes (or the horns) is beyond me. My research leads me to believe the rotating ATIs were a short lived product that were not advertised extensively, so there are certainly quite a few questions left to be answered.

MattDean1003 wrote:I'd like to see the document personally. Why would it not need to be posted? Is ATI afraid to show what's really inside their sirens?

Because the document had proprietary written all over it and contained sensitive information about an active installation. Some yo-yo put it out there when they really shouldn't have. If you find it on your own, great. It absolutely doesn't belong on these boards.