[EAS] Activity at the FCC

[Tom]

Yes; I await the results of the Washington State tests / rollout - and 
hope that when the FCC gets around to rewriting Part 11, they pay 
attention to your experiences.

Being in the #38 (according to the last Arbitron rank) radio market, 
what I hear... isn't.  Most stations don't bother with the audio that 
comes with the EAS alert; they have either a local or contracted (eg: TV 
weather person) or remote talent voice the actual message.  Just how 
much of a delay that generates, I couldn't say.  It seems to me, though, 
that the NOAA "All Hazards Radio" station - at least here - does a 
credible job of generating the alerts, and that link isn't subject to 
backhoe fades, as far as I know.  And the audio from NOAA, while not the 
best quality, is generally intelligible.  (And yes, I know it's 
text-to-speech software generating the audio).



k7cr wrote:
> Tom - 
>
> As you perhaps have heard, Washington State is not waiting for the 
> Feds to make up their mind and is rolling out our own CAP based
> system right now.

> As for other " vastly  more reliable, methods of delivering the message(s)
> to *radio* stations" - What would you propose? and (most important) 
> how would you fund it?.
>   

How to fund it is a political question, but for a start, finishing the 
deployment of the VHF NOAA radio system comes to mind as a 
"how-to-distribute", a similar system could be implemented for 
state/local government access; especially on the VHF reserved Public 
Safety channels - most jurisdictions have migrated to UHF for keeping in 
contact with their personnel, so those channels are now mostly vacant as 
far as actually being in-use (I don't know offhand how many have turned 
in their licenses for their VHF systems, though)

> Again I need to ask - What portions of EAS are you talking about?
> National, State, Local or Weather?
>
> As for the approach of simply upgrading SAME...I fail to see how 
> SAME could be upgraded to do what CAP will and is doing.
SAME was supposed to be addressable at least down to zip code areas, as 
I recall it - neighborhood level.  That was never implemented to any 
great extent, as far as I know - at least here, it stops at 
county-wide.  Someone pointed out that there's already an origination 
code that's intended for local and state authorities - CIV, I believe.


-- 
Tom Spencer
PG-18-25453 (nee' P1-18-48841)
http://radioxtz.com/
"If you keep on dancin, and dancin, and dancin...
They're gonna turn the music back ON!" - D. Dragon AKA The Captain