[EAS] An Open "Letter" to the National Weather Service - now postedon the EAS Forum

[Dave Turnmire]

On 8/20/2012 11:37 AM, Eric Adler wrote:

>...
>Once NWS's CAP feeds are able to be 'received' and utilized by our Sage, we will be able to much better serve our listeners/viewers and the region as we will have *more* alerts.

>Granted, our local NWS guys do a great job of not issuing alerts without good reason and I'm aware that this is not the case everywhere.
>...

For a short while, I configured my DASDEC to receive alerts from NOAA's CAP server.  That was a big mistake... at least at the current evolution of their service: 

1. Their CAP server sent out alerts that NWR did not... for the same county and same event types.  For whatever reason, who ever is responsible for their CAP server product is less discriminating than those responsible for their NWR product.
2. Their CAP server feed provides no audio.  Thus making it reliant on the Text-to-speech ability of our EAS box.  And... strangely to me, given how much they rely on text-to-speech for NWR... the text in their CAP product was decidedly NOT TTS friendly... and the result was audio that as a practical matter, was nearly useless.

So... I don't know whether the SAGE can be programmed to receive the NOAA CAP server feed or not... but for now... I'd advise against it.  Hopefully NOAA will adapt their procedures/infrastructure to make it more useful in time.  If they fixed the TTS issue, I could conceivably get better quality audio than from a voice grade NWR transmitter 45 miles away.  But for now... I'll stick with NWR.
Dave