[EAS] My thought on stations involvement of EAS

[Tom Bosscher]

To the list:

     1.    I'm new. Please be kind !
     2.    Mr. Rudman, who has more experience and knowledge 
of all thinsg that should be EAS, asked if I would cross 
post my response to a message on the SBE-EAS list. So I am here.
     3.    How can we convince Washington to name Richard 
Rudman and Clay Feinwell as EAS Czar's ?

My response to another post::

Jerry,

     Post of the month. If anyone looks at the new Sage, you 
will see an option to hold off anything except for an EAN, 
from the front panel, for a period of time. I requested that 
from Sage. I pointed out my concern to Harold Price and crew 
at NAB last year, in that I want the TOR's to go 
immediately, when we are not there. But we are staffed M-F 
5am to 9pm, and more than once, I had to pull the AC power 
to the older Sages so that we would not be interrupted by 
NOAA issued TOR's, as we were airing them live anyway.
     Michigan uses the Comlabs Emnet system. The MAB got a 
grant for all of the LP1's and 2's and counties to have a 
box. This is a very proper backdoor system to let me know 
what is going on. We are not an LP station, yet, we are 
going to buy our own Comlabs box for the $ 3,000, as we feel 
our listeners deserve to know what is going on. My 
commercial brethren? Most of them don't really seem to care. 
That bad for their listeners, good for me.
     We have and will put the CEM's on the air, but we, 
that's the license holder, do not want the EAS system to 
interrupt us while we are reading the CEM on the air! Now, 
if it's 3 pm on a Sunday afternoon, we will either allow it 
to go on the air via remote control, or in the case of an 
unstaffed TOR, it goes right away. We have a policy here 
that if there is any severe weather, someone has to be here 
within 30 minutes. In the meantime, we can go on the air 
from several home locations.
     Once we get the Comlabs and CAP is in place, our 5 
stations will be doing a very proper job to notify our 
listeners, and that it what it is all about.

                 tom bosscher


On 2/4/2011 3:43 AM, Jerry Mathis wrote:
> ...
> Now, having said /that/, EAS is a /wonderful/ method of 
> disseminating emergency information /when a station is 
> unmanned/. An EAS system, set properly to automatically 
> forward relative alerts, can still keep your station at 
> the head of the list of local radio stations people listen 
> to for emergency weather information.