[EAS] RWT trigger detection

[Dale Lamm]

[snip]

How would you introduce the closure to the remote control?  Therein lies
the rub...short of a multiple box system costing a few $K, you can't.

[end]

Now your requirements become more clear. If the remote EAS unit is on
the internet, and if the remote EAS unit contains a web server for
manual control, a human could connect via a browser and click on the 
"Send RWT" icon. No need for anything else, assuming manual control is
acceptable.

Your requirements seem to indicate that an automation system should be
able to initiate the RWT, which rules out using the site's remote
control to issue a "raise" command on some channel to close a relay at
the site.

Many automation systems can close a local relay. Broadcast Tools make
products "Status Sentinel" and "Relay Sentinel" which can be thought of
as a very long multi-conductor cable, transferring a local closure via
the internet to a remote relay.

If spending money on such a solution is not possible, you might be back
to the homebrew DTMF decoder at the site, along with injecting
"announcements" containing a DTMF burst into the traffic log for
playout. You'll have to deal with DTMF decoders that are not 100%
perfect. What happens if something somewhere fades or drops and white
noise hits the DTMF decoder?

Here's another possibility, with the caveat that I don't know everything
about your specific requirements. Go back to the first suggestion,
bringing up the EAS on a web browser and clicking the "Send RWT" icon by
hand. There are tools available for free that allow you to create
mouse-keyboard macros that will execute a specific sequence of moves,
keystrokes and clicks in a script file. You could start such a macro
from Windows "scheduled tasks" utility. Of course, if the RWT is to be
scheduled that way, then just tell the EAS unit to run the RWT on an
internal schedule. I know our unit can do this on it's own.

Let's work with this idea some more. Say you have the mouse-keyboard
macro generator working just as you like. Now you need a way to launch
the macro generator under command of the automation. The automation we
use cannot directly launch a BAT or EXE file from an AUX event in the
traffic log, so we have to get sneaky. You could construct a continually
running script that watches the automation's "as-aired" log for the
occurrence of a special event. For example, a song of zero length whose
title is "SEND RWT". Traffic places this "song" into the log. When your
script notices that this song has appeared in the tail end of the
as-aired log, it would launch the BAT file that runs the macro generator
and your RWT would go out.

There you go, a truly Rube Goldberg solution that costs nothing but your
time. Money back if not satisfied!