[EAS] Williamsburg, KY monitoring assignments

[Sean Donelan]

On Mon, 24 Mar 2014, Dan Peek wrote:
> Having responsibility for stations all over the country, it would be 
> nice to have one place to go to verify we are monitoring the correct 
> sources.

When I was trying to track down EAS monitoring assignments in 13 
different states for a new cable/IP video network, I looked at all the 
Internet available state EAS plans, and created a merged list of EAS areas 
to compare against the FCC licensing database. This is out of date, and 
not intended for operational use, but for discussion.

   http://www.donelan.com/eas-areas.xlsx

I also had a more detailed spreadsheet, with monitoring assignments for
each EAS area (sometimes multiple monitoring options).

The blank spots indicated no public EAS plan found, or for a couple of 
states no clear designation of discrete EAS operational areas in their 
published plan.  The good news is in most cases it was relatively 
straightforward.  But there are several corner cases, and even a few 
"orphan" EAS areas. There is a reason why the cellular industry pushed 
for a single, national point of contact for WEA alert monitoring.

Matching against the FCC licensing database was a bit more challanging
due to EAS operational areas generally defined in terms of counties, while
licensees are defined in terms of communities, which aren't unique or
well defined.  And of course, there are exceptions, but not as many as
I thought, less than a thousand exceptions.

At this month's CSIRC meeting the EAS group had a recommendation for 
including EAS monitoring information with the FCC Universal Licensing
Database.  I don't know whether the states which don't release their
EAS state plans want or don't want that information to be available.