[EAS] National test won't be shown on AT&T U-verse?

[Sean Donelan]

On Wed, 9 Nov 2011, suzanne at mab.org wrote:
> This puzzles me.  It's the tag of a story from Broadcasting & Cable 
>about the FCC order not to use the alert tones in news stories.  If the 
>duration of the test is the issue, does that suggest that U-verse can't 
>even run RMTs because they're "too short"? --SG

Its actually a potential issue for all systems.

RMTs are recorded store&forward; EANs are re-broadcast "live."

Because RMTs are store&forward, i.e. the ENDEC records the incoming 
message, and then re-generates the recorded message on the downstream 
feed, its not a problem.  But with EANs, there is a delay through the EAS 
daisy-chain as each repeater generates the tones/quakes and force tune to 
the "live" feed already in progress.  If you are monitoring a PEP 
directly, the delay may be only 5-15 seconds until the ENDEC puts the 
"live" feed on the air after it re-generates the EAS tones; but if you are 
several steps down the daisy-chain, it takes a small amount of time for 
each station in the chain to switch to the "live" feed, the feed could be 
over.

Add in other delays such as digital TV encoding/decoding; things can get
interesting as engineers say.