Today is the National Test of the Emergency Alert System.

Welcome back to The Chronicles of Trevor, the blog that's become a sort of Oddity Archive clone. No offense, but I love that show. Ben Minnotte is a legend!

Today marks the day of the National Test of the Emergency Alert System. At 2:20 PM ET, All phones, TV and radio stations in the U.S. will take part in a national periodic test, where you'll hear the infamous "Attention Signal", made up of two-tones, usually after 3 bursts of data. These are the bane of the existance of many TV viewers, but how it works is awesome.

The National Periodic Test originated November 9, 2011, where it was a failure. Some stations had the test message in a feedback loop, DirecTV subscribers were serenaded by Lady GaGa's "Paparazzi", and a few stations had silence!

After that catastrophic failure, the next tests went MUCH more smoother. 2020 and 2022 had no NPT as a result of the disease we shall not speak of, and the holidays, respectively. So this is the 1st test after the one-year hiatus.

I wish all stations good luck with the test!

Update: I got the alert on my phone. It even played the signal.

This is a scrrencap of how it looked on independent station WHDH-7, during an airing of Allen Media Group's version of Funny You Should Ask (no big loss there).