[EAS] Timelimit

[Dale Lamm]

[snip]

So, as a practical matter, for adherence to the legacy EAS common use,
and the new CAP standards, two minutes is the limit for non-EAN
messages.  EAN messages are defined as having no time limit.

[end]

To Harold's excellent description, I would like to address a "gotcha"
that is easily corrected at the station level.

At one time, our station (and others in the state) had the attention
tone filtering turned off. Some EAS messages are relayed over several
hops, for example, an AMBER alert originating at a statewide entry
point. If you begin with a 1:45 length AMBER message, then add in all
the 8-second attention tones that are prefixed by each relay station,
pretty soon the total message length exceeds what will fit into the
2-minute buffer. Message truncation likely results for those stations at
the end of the chain.

Our SECC and state association of broadcasters was instrumental in
encouraging LP's to fine-tune their attention tone filtering. This
solved the problem of unwanted message growth and resultant truncation.