[EAS] CAP, Text to Speech, and April 23

[Ed Czarnecki]

Mike - With all due respect, that is a plea best made to the regulators,
rather than the manufacturers.   

Our product roadmaps - however phased we may desire - ultimately need to
respond to any changes or clarifications made by FCC/FEMA.   We've already
seen one bump (TTS), and I'm sure there will be several others before and
after June 30th.

We are keenly attuned to the issues you list below - we have several large
cable customers with hundreds of our units at remote facilities, not close
to eachother, with many of the same constraints.  Trust me, we are extremely
mindful of the time and lack of resources - whether a single radio station
or a mega-cable company.  

Keeping the number of software updates to a manageable minimum is - has been
- and will continue to be - a baseline objective on our part.  We prefer to
issue updates just a few times a year, at most, as needed.  Other
manufacturers likely share the same point of view.  However, as industry we
must respond to the regulatory mandates the flow down from the authorities.

-----Original Message-----
From: eas-bounces at radiolists.net [mailto:eas-bounces at radiolists.net] On
Behalf Of Mike McCarthy

Harold and the group of manufacturers, a plea......

Everyone seems to forget it takes time, sometimes lots of it, to impliment
repeated and closely succeding updates in multiple locations not in close
proximity to each other, nor visited with any regularity. This is one reason
our boxes are sitting in storage some 6 months after they were bought. We
can't justify the labor costs to repeatedly update the boxes across those
remote locations. The costs really add up quickly between the miles/gas
costs, time in traffic, and ultimately on site preparing for and doing the
deed.

Now while there will be the comment to do so remotely, I've heard far too
many horror stories about that process failing and a trip to the site
becomes a matter of greater urgency with the box having become inoperative,
a compliance risk, and unable to send severe weather alerts.
Plus there are all the firewall issues to contend at sites we don't own and
are merely begging the IP service. As such, remote updating is a risky and
perilous  use of time.....

Of the 8 boxes we bought for our group, I have a couple 3644's going into
remote locations not visited often by engineering types. One site not much
at all. As such, anything we do with our rollout scheduled for mid-June will
need to be a one shot deal. We can't keep going back and forth to remote
sites for bi-monthly (or more frequent) firmware updates as Harold aludes
here.

I recognize things are variable/in-motion (some more than others) and you're
doing what you can to pin the tail on the bucking donkey's behind (polite
metaphor). The CAP update and all things surrounding it is an unfunded
mandate and the repeated firmware updates along with the intermitant fixes
only drives salt into the wound for those who have already deployed their
gear into their far flung locations. I'm already too busy as it is to reach
most places even monthly.  And I'm expected to do this how many more times
after June 30? Can I have a stable and long living version to upload by June
1 instead of another iterative update right after NAB?

Please guys...give our odometers and fuel bills at $4.50/gal. a rest.

Rant mode off....

Mike McCarthy
Chicago

>
> Looking ahead, all about June 30, for Sage users.
>
> You will need to be receiving CAP messages by June 30.  We will have 
> pre-release of the IPAWS enabled ENDEC software out this week.  After 
> everyone is back from the NAB show, we'll make that release available 
> for general use.
>
> At that time, we'll include the instructions for setting the IPAWS url.
>
> Harold Price
> Sage Alerting Systems

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