WPS-2900s and I-Forces In Classic Wail/Attack - Saudi Arabia

[DJ2226]

Saudi Arabia recently tested their sirens, and it was pretty interesting. Let's start with Riyadh's system. As far as we know they had a mix of older analog Whelens and ACA Alertronics and some other mechanical sirens. Over the years this system was upgraded to what was believed to be I-Force 3200s, but as it turns out they went with Whelen at some point and installed 2900 series sirens with the 2905 being the most prevalent. The I-Force 3200s ended up going elsewhere in the country. I suspect that one of the cities they went to was Dammam.

Here's the kicker. A couple of years ago ASC showed off an I-Force 3200 at their headquarters running in an odd attack in a Facebook video and later one a controller running a similar tone. It was a recording that was programmed into the controller, and it sounded pretty rough. When I left a comment on the video of the I-Force ASC responded back that it wasn't optimized. Well it appears that this is a custom tone selected by the country's government. The custom tones seems to have been created for the Whelen sirens in that system. Unlike the WPS "Thunderbolts" of Wichita Falls these use an actual custom tone made for the controllers and not a looped aduio recording stored in the controller's memory. I believe the logic board that drives them is the ESC-2030 since they have such a smooth ramp up/down. The I-Forces use this tone too, although it seems that they are still using the rough sounding one from the videos. Both the 2900s and I-Forces run in this odd attack tone, an attack where each wind down is interrupted, and alert. The alert peaks at the same pitch as the attack. It seems that the tone is based off of a combination of the tone that was heard coming from those sirens in the video from the rocket attack back in '91 and the peak pitch of the ESC-2030 in wail. This is the first example of a modern ESC-2030 driven Whelen system in the wild in classic wail.

This is a video of one of their 2905's, what with all the flashing lights. The classic wail tone should be standard in my honest opinion. The Intermittent classic wail tone starts at 1:35, classic wail at 2:54, and alert 3:41. Alert peaks at roughly 610 Hz and cuts into the attack tone upon activation kind of like our system with wail and air horn.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN4_zdowDwM

This is a video of a 2905 being tested from 2014. It activates in that Intermittent tone and actually winds down when it gets the cancel tones. With an audio recording it would have just abruptly cut out mid cycle. The were using live voice, so just before it activates in the tone you can hear it spat out some DTMF tones.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJT95L_7mJ4

This is an up close video of a 2905 in classic wail. They cut away from it right before it activates in alert.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28guxgzwAIA

This is one of Dammam's sirens. I suspect that these are I-Forces.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngS32fx7Smo



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pClpzhs1yk

This is a link to a video of the I-Force at ASC HQ doing the attack tone. It sounds identical to the ones in Dammam's system.
https://www.facebook.com/akraczek1205/v ... 245873392/