[EAS] Best and Worst of New CAP EAS Rules

[Tom Taggart]

Thanks, Harold, for confirming my worst fear.  There is
nothing more useless than just airing header and EOM--as I
mentioned earlier, NWS Pittsburgh used to do that. They
monitored TV cable--saw a crawl, and assumed everything was
working OK.  Even though the NWS relay station I monitored
wasn't sending any alert audio. 

A suggestion from the State of Washington that they are
going to use text-to-speech whether the Commission approves
or not may get the FCC's attention. 

The Report and Order appears to have been written by the
legal staff with only a limited grasp of how any of these
devices are going to work in the real world. Given the
timing--probably 45 days before the R & O appears in the
Federal Register, may be something to bring up publicly at
the April NAB show. Bureaucrats don't like any signs of
dissent.  Either they will quickly reconsider, or get their
backs up.  If they throw up the barricades, at that point we
will know this is all a bad joke, like some of their other
stupid rules. Case in point: the "No advertising
discrimination" statement which everyone gets to swear to in
this renewal cycle, a rule that is impossible to comply
with.

RDS: While you could use RDS as a supplement to the alert
audio, many car radios chop up the display to the point of
being unreadable. There is a company that sells a
semi-closed circuit alerting system using the "second page"
of RDS (available on a number of European car radios, but
not commonly found here). They sell radios with a larger
display just for this purpose. Local college installed such
a system after the Virginia Tech incident from several years
ago.