Germany's nationwide emergency warning day sees bumpy rollout

That's factually incorrect. The nationwide alarm test day is designated to be the 2nd Thursday of September - the actual date will naturally differ from year to to year.

This is just sloppy journalism.

Example: Yes, my home village and the surrounding 20-30 Villages all have their old air-raid sirens to notify the members of the fire brigade. A system which is quite old and was rock solid reliable. During the transistion from analog radio to digital radio, the receivers were upgraded to be triggered by digital radio (TETRA to be precise). This, we found out, now means that during a power outage, there is no way to alert the fire brigade because the sirens dont have power. We now have people sitting in the fire station again whenever our Village has a power out to use the on-vehicle radio to communicate with the dispatch.

TETRA itself is also a disaster. And even worse: Its not even universally accepted. This means that local muncipalities can decide to stay with the old analog system while others have the new digital one. In theory, the digital one has a bazillion advantages. However, all of those advantages in the end create more problems than they solve.

For example, better voice quality - just leads to people being completely not understandable when using breathing masks to enter a building (Something to do with filtering).

Also, analog fails gracefully. Digital stops working. And it stops working a lot earlier. This means, you now have to use a repeater at the entrance of a building to talk to people in the building, because the digital radio often does not work. This happens mostly in direct (Walkie Talkie Mode)

When in cellular mode, good luck finding a signal in 50% of the rural areas - This mode is vital to talk to the dispatcher to call for support/additional units.

The whole system is supposed to be used by everyone. Military, Federal and Local Police, Fire Brigade, EMT... which means there has to be a rights management system to access certain channels. This is hardcoded into every device. This often means that a device does not have the permission to cooperate or that only the one device of the commander can access certain channels.

There is a 2 Second delay between pressing the talk button and a connection being established due to the encoding and permission management leading to people often having to resend because the first words were cut off.

Its just a complete and abject failure everywhere. And you can look wherever you want, and its the same. Working things get rationalized, or "modernized", resulting in a less capable, more expensive, more complex system.

Or, in our case, to carry two devices, one digital and one analog.

For some reason, the SMS broadcast was not used.

For some reason, the air raid sirens didn't go off in many cities.

I'm somewhat disappointed - organization in emergency cases is what Germany usually get right.