[BC] Yes, EAS works!

[Rob Landry]

Because no station I have anything to do with ever originates an EAS alert, my philosophy is to take as much of EAS out of human hands as possible. The log has to be checked by a human once a week, and that's the only aspect that can't legally be automated.

At one station, even the scheduling of the RWT's is done by the automaion system. At 11 PM Sunday night, a process runs that picks a day of the wek at random and saves it in a file. Anther process runs daily just before midnight and determines whether tomorrow is the chosen day; if it is, it picks an hour at random, finds the first break in the chosen hour in tomorrow's log, and inserts three lines:

1) An audio cut containing "The following is a test of the emergency alert system";

2) A command to trigger an RWT on the EAS encoder;

3) A second audio cut containing 15 seconds of silence during which the test will run.

The test then runs in the appointed break. If it fails, I notice it when I check the log at the beginning of the week. But it hasn't, yet.

Traffic and programming need not worry at all anout EAS, and management only needs to decide whether or not to relay severe thunderstorm warnings or Amber alerts.

Rob