[EAS] State Plan Mapbooks

[Dave Turnmire]

Anyone care to tell me how I'm supposed to interpret the following Part 11.21(a) excerpt in practical terms?

>"State EAS plans should include a data table, in computer readable form, clearly showing monitoring assignments and the specific primary and backup path for the emergency action notification ("EAN") from the PEP to each station in the plan."  

My state's plans (State and Local) has historically been a Word document, distributed in PDF form.  The local plans are where the monitoring assignments are listed.  It is organized in a human readable format.  I don't know what "computer readable form" means in this context.  And what is the purpose of this... is it to make it easy for the FCC to extract into a master database of theirs?  I maintain an Access database with more detailed info on each EAS Participant for my own purposes, but no one has ever seen it and it isn't directly tied to the Local Plan (I enter data manually into both documents at the same time).  But if the goal is for the FCC to have easy access to the monitoring assignments, it would be easier for me to extract the info from my Access database and email it to them in CSV or Excel form.

I suppose I could re-organize our Local Plan and the Access database such that the "map book" portion of the Local Plan is in fact an Access report.  But it still wouldn't help out the FCC all that much unless they had me send them a separate CSV or Excel file with the "mapbook" data.  And the computer skills of the LECC chairs vary throughout the state and at a given time, so I can't guarantee what is practical for a low population density state that has a hard enough time coming up with chairs of our committees as it is.  They are, after all, volunteers... with other demands on their time.  And I'd rather they spent their limited time keeping up with the seemingly daily changes in radio station ownership/callsigns/studio locations.  Not to mention keeping in contact with local emergency management.

Dave