[EAS] Fwd: [ChicagolandSkywarn] WEA Enabled Phones to Receive Emergency Messages

[Alan Kline]

At some point, people have to take some sort of responsibility for their 
own safety. We can't do it all for them. We can provide tools, but it's 
up to individuals to acquire them and learn how to use them.

As far as finding stations with emergency info: Let's assume for sake of 
argument that Apple enables iPhone FM--a lot of Androids already have 
it. Some enterprising programmer could write an app that has a database 
of FM LP-1's and LP-2's, and uses the phone's GPS capability to 
determine which one is nearest to the user. The app then silently 
monitors that signal and activates when it decodes a valid SOM sequence. 
The app would work in the background, but its GUI could certainly tell 
the user what signal is being monitored. Heck, the GUI could even 
display the text of an incoming EAS message. (DASDEC for iPhone, 
anyone?) None of that is beyond the technology of the phones or the app 
writers as they now exist.

As I wrote in my response to Clay, having NWS radio capability in phones 
would be nice, but the currently available chips don't provide for 
reception in the weather radio band. So unless there's some compelling 
reason for the chip makers to add it, we won't see it anytime soon.

But again, we can only do so much. We can try to educate the public. We 
can try to put NOAA radios in the hands of the public--we've done 
promotions to make those radios available either free or at a bargain 
price. We'll even program them for people.

On 5/16/2012 3:08 PM, Eric Adler wrote:
> I don't think relying on the user/listener is sane or proper for an emergency messaging implementation.  If we were relying on the user, s/he could have his address programmed into his/her phone and network based messaging could be used.  The major draw to having FM appears to be that, while phones move, FM is always (relatively) locally originated.
>
> I was traveling last summer and away from any familiar stations for a number of days, in a part of the country that I'd never even visited before, I didn't know what was on the FM dial other than the music station I found to keep myself sane on the road; it is highly unlikely for someone to become aware of what station to tune to for emergency information in a relatively short period of time.  I live in an area that was hit with natural disaster this past fall and folks still don't seem to agree 100% on what station is best to tune to for their emergency information needs.  I think when designing emergency notification, one needs to think about someone who just "appeared" and has minimal knowledge of the area; an airline passenger traveling who is stopped at an unfamiliar airport for a layover, awaiting his/her next flight, for a more practical example.
>
> I think a better course of action might be some sort of alerting tone (or perhaps a subcarrier?) that notified of availability of messaging.  NOAA would, of course, be a nice addition to phones... perhaps there could be stations that volunteer to rebroadcast their local NOAA NWS NWR station in an emergency and the (list of) frequency(-ies) could be encoded in NOAA's EAS activation?
>
> Just some thoughts...
>
> Eric
>
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