The Siren Board

Several sirens around the Madison area are officially marked as "Siratone" models, but I'm not familiar with any model or manufacturer by name. I know they look very similar to the FS EOWS series, but is there a relation between them.

Dane county has all of it's sirens marker with spectacular recency and detail (more than any county I've mapped so far), and specifically I'm wondering about Siratone 612's, and 1212's.

The Dane county siren list & map can be found here: https://www.countyofdane.com/emergency/sirens/.

IIRC, "Siratone" was the controller model.

I'm not entirely sure I understand what a controller model is

Just like different sirens are different models, the different controllers are different models. Does that make sense?

The contoller is what produces the sound for the siren speaker head and it also receives the commands on when and what to play. Without it all the EOWS does is sit and look like it is going to fall over from a big gust of wind. There is a board inside the SireTone that stores all of the sound files. You can also hook up a mic to the controller to do live PA things. I bieleve it also stores the speaker amps, but I am not 100% sure on that...

Federal also called its early EOWS sirens Siratone as well. EOWS = Electronic Outdoor Warning Siren, btw.

So you might see an EOWS*612 also labeled as a SiraTone 612 in the literature.

BTW: saying tones are loaded on a board is really false. Its all done through tone generators, which are part of the electronic circuitry. The only things loaded as sound files are digital voice files. UltraVoice controllers load them via onboard FLASH Memory. Whelens do it via digital voice chips.

But, to help you out on the Federal end, they've been through multiple versions of their controller.

The SiraTone controller is their first generation electronic siren controller, shipping with the 612, 812, 1212, and 115. Their second generation controller is the Modulator Controller (MC). The third generation is the Modulator Controller--PowerPlus (MCP). The current generation of controller is the UltraVoice.

Hope that makes sense.

Okay I'm getting it now. That was incredibly simple when you look at it like that. So essentially Madison has a lot of these Gen I EOWS sirens.

I was aware of what EOWS meant and the basic workings of it, but some terms still ellude me as it's only the second month I've been looking into sirens. At this point I understand the fundamentals of the sirens themselves but I haven't even touched the controls or electronics as of yet.

uncommonsense wrote:Whelens do it via digital voice chips.

What exactly is a "digital voice chip"? :crazy: