With the severe weather week and drills approaching, there's 1 thing I've always wondered: I've never quite understood how they set the weather warning sirens off in the counties. Is it simply transmitting the right tones over the dispatch tower at the right frequency similar to an autopatch phonecall through a repeater? Is this the same way that the fire/EMS stations that still use horns to alert their members out in the country activate them? I always understood this was all manual -that someone had to physically go and turn the thing on at the site. (At least that's how our fire horn used to operate, but that was about 30 years ago!)
Some areas use tone activation, others systems like Motorola's MOSCAD. Depends on the area.