[EAS] Best and Worst of New CAP EAS Rules

[Harold Price]

>At 08:09 PM 1/17/2012, Tom Taggart wrote:

>I assume for text-to-speech to work there must be a flag of
>some sort in the message, e.g. "start converting text here."
>  So, unless there is an audio file attached, and the message
>is not encoded with such a flag, the decoder will simply
>generate duck farts, tone, then EOM, right?

CAP provides several fields of data, of interest here are "headline", 
"description", and "instruction".  The originator can use any or all 
of those fields.  One of the documents referenced in the 5th R&O, the 
ECIG implementation guide, says what to do with the data in those 
fields to generate the text crawl.

Big picture, though, you are correct, there is something in the CAP 
message that says "start converting text here".

The ECIG I.G. says to use the audio if there is any attached, and to 
use the Text to Speech conversion on the text crawl data if there 
isn't any audio.

The just released 5th R&O, however, says don't use TTS, so if there 
is no audio file provided by the originator, the audio over the air 
will just consist of the headers, sounding much like a weekly test.

There is plenty of time for everyone to take a breath and possibly 
revisit the issue.  There are many procedures to ask the FCC to 
reconsider this rule making, or to just petition for a new rule 
making, should feedback from the user community warrant it.  The FCC 
can also simply make a change on their own.

My understanding of this particular proceeding is that we're waiting 
for publication in the federal register, then a 30 day formal 
reconsideration period starts.  Anyone can file for reconsideration 
of part or all of the new ruling, you don't need to wait for the 30 
day clock to start.  You can even simply file an "ex parte" filing on 
the web site now.

States/broadcasters that are currently using TTS can ask for a 
temporary waiver of that part of the rules, otherwise, if there is no 
other action, use of TTS would not be permitted starting 30 days 
after publication of the 5th R&O in the Federal Register.

Harold