[EAS] IPAWS NPT for West Virginia Next Week

[Gary Timm]

Team EAS,
Sorry for the delay, but here's a recap of the FEMA webinar held a couple weeks ago.

The next Nationwide EAS Test will occur sometime after the FCC has adopted a National EAS Location Code, most likely in late 2015, and will involve IPAWS (EAS, WEA, NWS and the Public Feed).
The primary announcement was that to prepare for this test, FEMA will be conducting an IPAWS-based test targeted to the State of West Virginia at approximately 2:00 PM EDT on September 17, which is next Wednesday.  Parameters for the EAS coding are:
Event Code: National Periodic Test (NPT)
Originator Code: Primary Entry Point (PEP)
Location Code: All of West Virginia
FEMA has met with stations in West Virginia and is requesting that they program their EAS units to auto-forward the NPT as part of the test.  Additional info on this test is in the FEMA News Release below.
If for any reason your EAS unit is programmed to react to NPTs with no Location Code limitation, it will react to this test, so check your programming if you have a filter programmed for NPT.

Other info on the FEMA webinar:
- Currently 46 of 48 states in the CONUS are signed up to originate IPAWS alerts (Montana and South Dakota are the stragglers).
- Currently there are 40-50 redistribution partners signed up to use the Public Feed.
- In addition to the Monday IPAWS RWTs, FEMA will be adding additional alerts targeted to groups of states with attached audio or a URI pointing to a web-based audio file, in order to test the effect of a high number of users accessing these audio files.
- In the future, FEMA plans to start routine NPTs via IPAWS.
- NWS continues testing to enable their alerts to be relayed on IPAWS EAS; the issue is detection of duplicates with legacy EAS-issued alerts.
- There were at least 75 attendees on the call.

Address questions on this webinar to: Alfred.Kenyon at fema.dhs.gov
Address general IPAWS-related questions to: ipaws at dhs.gov

Gary Timm
WI SECC