How to Get Text Alerts from Your Burk ARC System

How to Get Text Alerts from Your Burk ARC System

· by Sam Greenspan

I don’t have to tell you this, but when your transmitter drops off the air, it’s kind of a big deal.

So if the best way your system has to notify you is an email alert — the same medium that we’ve spent 25 years now training ourselves to not treat urgently — that’s not great.

Texts are better. We answer texts.

And hey, your Burk ARC system looks like it offers them! You can see in the docs that there’s an “SMS” option, next to email and telephone. So you go into the settings to switch it on.

There’s nothing to switch on.

Because… welp, Burk doesn’t actually text. The guides direct you to use the email-to-text addresses provided by cell phone carriers. But over the past few years, the carriers have actually shut all those down.

So what are we going to do? Use the modern email to text solution to get you those SMS alerts. (And, um, if you still have a vtext or txt.att.net address in there, we’re going to get those replaced because they haven’t been working for quite a while.)

Burk ARC Text Alerts: Table of Contents

The Modern Way to Set Up Text Alerts on Your Burk ARC System

Note: Everything below is written for the ARC Plus family. An ARC Solo does the same things in its own web UI, just in slightly different places.

Step 1: Sign up to get email to SMS alerts

We’re going to use text.email, which is the modern version of what the cell phone carriers were doing with email-to-SMS. (Though text.email also has at least a dozen other features the old carriers didn’t.)

Sign up at the website. Then pick a subdomain that’s unique to your account, so you’ll have an address like your-number@yoursubdomain.text.email.

Copy your address. We’ll need it for the next step.

(Also, if you need your alerts to text a team and not just one person, use text.email’s distribution lists. You can even set up scheduling for when different team members receive texts.)

Step 2: Make sure your Burk is already sending alarm emails

Over on the Burk side, go to AutoLoad Plus under Edit > Settings > Alarm Notifications.

To send an email at all, your Burk needs an SMTP server to send through. If it’s already emailing you alerts, you’ve got one and you’re set, so skip to Step 3.

If it isn’t emailing yet, you can either use your station or company’s SMTP info. Or, if that’s going to be a whole thing, text.email gives you an SMTP server for a quick solution.

Step 3: Make a “text alert” list and add your address

In the Email Lists tab in Burk, create a new list, call it something like “Text alert,” and drop in your text.email address.

We want a dedicated text list so you can route just the text-worthy alarms that way. (Routine alerts stay on an email-only list.) Burk gives you up to 32 lists, so there’s room.

Then hit Test Email (the envelope icon) and confirm you get the text alert.

Step 4: Add the text list to your critical alarms

In each channel’s config, use the Meter Notifications and Status Notifications tabs to attach your text list to the channels you want coming through as texts.

You know best what those should be, but I do have some suggestions to get you started later in the article.

Why Not Just Use Burk’s Voice Dial-Out?

In lieu of texting, Burk does have one native feature to get critical alerts to you in a more disruptive way than email: Calling you.

The Burk calls you and reads the alarm out loud, and a ringing phone is about as hard to ignore as an alert gets. On the ARC Solo it’s built in.

So why might text be better?

Beyond the matter of preference — who makes calls anymore, right? — there’s the persistence issue.

A call happens once. Miss it and it’s gone, or you have a voicemail. A text is the same if you see it in the moment, or 30 seconds later, or 5 minutes later when you’re out of the shower, or whenever.

Plus, if you need to reach more than one person, the text.email distribution lists do that more cleanly than a single call.

Get Your Burk Text Alerts Going ASAP

Ready to get this all set up — probably within about 10, maybe 15, minutes?

Email to text is the easiest way to get critical alerts from your Burk ARC system — alerts you won’t miss.

And the method I described above doesn’t require any new infrastructure, any new equipment, or any engineering intervention. It’s copy and paste.

Head over to text.email, grab your address, and add it to a Burk Email List on the alarms worth a text.

If you want to test this out first, you can. Just drop yournumber@text.email into your Burk dashboard (you don’t have to sign up first or anything) and send the test alert. It will come to your phone so you can see how smooth this all works.

What Deserves a Text vs. an Email?

You know your situation better than I do, so take this as a starting point.

Every alarm matters (otherwise they wouldn’t be alarms), but some are worth stopping the world for and some can wait. The former come to you via text, the latter stay in email.

Here’s my rough idea for dividing things up to get you going.

For text:

  • Silence / dead air
  • Transmitter off or hard fault
  • High VSWR / reflected power
  • Loss of connection to the site
  • Tower light / beacon failure

Could go either way:

  • Forward power sagging below threshold
  • AC power failure or generator start
  • Door or entry at an unmanned site
  • High rack temperature

For email:

  • Routine status changes
  • Readings you only check when you’re going through logs

Burk ARC Text Alerts: Next Steps to Get You Started

Alright. That’s how you can quickly get alerts texted to you from your Burk ARC system.

Sign up at text.email and drop your address into your dashboard to get alerts about the most critical situations: silence, off-air, high VSWR, loss of comms, and anything else.

This is a true set-it-and-forget-it situation. From then on, your urgent alerts will reliably and immediately hit your phone with no new hardware or even ongoing maintenance.

Try text.email free

Send an email to
your-number@text.email
and receive it as a text in seconds. No signup required.