[EAS] Happenings at the FEMA booth at NAB

[Richard_Rudman]

What we learned yesterday at the FEMA booth at NAB:

The EAS EAN live code national test has not been set for a firm date yet. The best estimate now is "late this year".

We feel that FEMA is very much aware that a lot has to be done not only for public awareness before the test, but awareness in the emergency management community, elected officials -- in short all EAS stakeholders. This test may be promoted in awareness campaigns as a "benchmark" test of "classic EAS".

FEMA is also aware of the need for wireless backup out to broadcasters for their CAP aggregator. Nothing to announce yet.

CAP messages will carry coding to let CAP EAS devices know if there is either live or recorded audio that is part of the message. The other "voice" mode is of course text-to-speech. Nothing new, but I thought it should be mentioned at this time since it is part of the presentation being shown in the FEMA booth.

The announcement of the IP address for the Federal CAP aggregator will probably not be made for several more months. FEMA is setting up what was referred to in their presentation as a "private feed" for broadcasters. The feed they were demonstrating today was not the feed we will see. That, we were told, will be an RSS feed.

We were told that FEMA is going to videotape their presentations. As soon as we have links to those presentations, we will get the word out.

No word yet on when the FCC will release their NPRM on the Part 11 rewrite. Please take a moment to look at the Part 11 wishlist you can download at:

http://eas.radiolists.net/info/part11.html

Stay tuned.

Richard