[EAS] Strict Time

[Alex Hartman]

If there's a chance for a band-aid approach to EAS, any and all opportunity should be taken. If it's in the realm of nothing more than a firmware update across the board (which a majority would be, maybe some new EEPROMs for the older equipment). 

This is by no means a "fix", but just a band-aid of lowest common denominator. Adding clock information in the duck farts is very trivial at that level. Weather radios for instance would ignore that section of the header since they have their own clocking information already (expire times and such). 

As for removing NWS/NWR from monitoring roles, i'm not aware of any (around here anyways) where the required monitor LP1/2 is a NOAA station. Many stations do it as the courtesy and has become the foregone conclusion that we all just monitor our LP1/2 and NWS. Since NWS has taken an active stance (at this point anyways) to not be involved in CAP either, this further solidifies this conclusion. (Yes, yes, CAP is not EAS... yet)

And here's where the big mis-step comes from. How do you sync a non-participating government entity? You don't, not without federal mandate and funding. Given our current "need" of a 1.2 trillion dollar fighter jet at the congressional level, i'm guessing we're still "broke" for "trivial" items like this. It's still very possible to spoof the system, and now with the Internet era, someone here said it best, we've gotten damn lucky nobody's 1) figured out how or 2 (and more likely)) doesn't care to figure it out. But if CAP trumps EAS for EAN for instance, you could be in the middle of the Sahara desert with a satellite uplink and set off the system. Nobody would even know how, why, where... that is, until it's too late. No proactive thoughts here!

The biggest problems really about this whole system is actually the vendors having a say in what goes on, not the people who have to use it. No offense Ed, but you do have a financial stake in this game. CAP was an answer waiting for a problem, luckily enough it got a federal mandate. CAP is by no means anywhere near perfect. Matter of fact, it's pretty horribly designed and implemented from an IT standpoint. But Monroe, Sage, etc, needed new business, CAP was the answer for the companies. Push it out the door so we can make some money, we'll fix the problems later. Take this as an editorial, but from the outside looking in, this is how it looks. Even with the best of intentions.

Picking from the standards is actually quite easy, it's implementation that's hard. And using standards tends to bring in new problems as well, using a 50 year old standard is bound to have gaping holes in it. Or as we have all seen from the AoIP and codec world, creating and implementing standards is usually left up to the vendors on the implementation. "Well, we support X standard, but we only implemented the very basic functions" type of thing, where the "other guy" implemented the standard completely according to the RFC/ISO/etc... This is where using "standards" gets into problems. You HAVE to tell the vendors SPECIFICALLY HOW to implement the standards for interoperability. Otherwise you end up with just another standard that nobody uses and again, we fail to learn from history.

--
Alex Hartman