[EAS] FEMA to do webinar on results of national EAS test

[Sean Donelan]

On Tue, 22 Nov 2011, Kluger, Michael wrote:
> While I understand the issues of the time limit and message priority, I 
> was surprised to read that an NPT code for national distribution would 
> cause an issue with location.  Logically, since an NPT is by definition 
> a national event, I would expect EAS units to treat NPTs the same way 
> as EANs with respect to FIPS code.  That is to say, if an EAS unit 
> interprets an EAN as valid for the entire US regardless of what FIPS 
> code the header contains because it is a national event code, wouldn't 
> it be logical for it to also consider an NPT as valid for the entire US 
> regardless of the FIPS code?

Logic and interoperability aren't always the same.  Different people
can make different assumptions, and reach what appear to be a logical
conclusions which aren't interoperable.  Either person may be right or
wrong, without having additional information about the starting 
assumptions.

The EAS transmission protocol has always been incompletely specified, and 
in some places contradictory in the FCC rules, NOAA WRSAME specification 
and other EAS documentation, i.e. handbook.  There are a lot of 
corner-cases which can, and do have interoperability issues between 
systems.  Commentors in several rulemakings asked the FCC to clarify some 
issues on handling "national" events.  But the FCC declined to answer 
those questions, or in the case of a "national" location repeatedly said 
that there was no need for a "national" location code.

Without knowing the overall plan and concept of operations, it is not
possible to determine whether the EAS protocol matches the intent or
assumptions of the national plan or whether those corner-cases don't 
matter.

The current FCC Part 11 rules do not specify any different or special 
handling of the "NPT" event code, or any "national" events besides 
EAN/EAT.  Since the NPT event code has never needed to be transmitted 
nationally, maybe it doesn't matter. Since it is not specified nor 
tested, you can't assume that EAS encoder/decoders would process other 
"national" event codes and FIPS codes differently than state/local
codes. Some decoders may do something, some may be programable to do 
another thing, some may do nothing.

At this point, is it even worth the effort to fix the existing EAS 
transmission protocol?  Or would it be better to move on, and figure out
how the overall emergency public plan should work and come up with a new 
way of doing it?  Neither is likely to be compatible with legacy hardware 
or plans.  Trying to maintain backward compatiblity is part of the reason 
we ended up with odd corner-cases making the transition from EBS to EAS.

Trying to reverse engineer how an emergency public alerting plan should
work from the EAS transmission protocol rules probably is the wrong 
approach.