[EAS] EAS monitoring sources

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

This thread has gone on awhile and I'm no longer sure of my grasp of the various points that have been made.  However... without having done a careful re-reading of the Rules I'm not sure there's anything that precludes the use of SAME encoding (the data burst) or even the traditional two-tone within a QST in the ham service, if someone wanted to.  Perhaps someone can remind me.  Automated rebroadcast of content from a broadcast station might be a trickier proposition, rules-wise.

I guess my real question, given how infrequently EAS gets used in most areas, is whether this something hams would find sufficiently gratifying to sustain an effort?  For the most part... and present company excepted, of  course... we can barely keep the broadcasters interested.

Personally I'd love to see some experimentation on how CAP could be transmitted in audio or other narrow bandwidth, perhaps using an ASN.1 encoding.  That would have a lot broader applicability that just EAS and just in the States.  (I have a long-held fantasy of seeing the old marine distress frequency of 500kHz repurposed as a global wide-area alerting channel.) 

Although I'm afraid a lot of our current difficulties stem directly from the choice of using in-program-channel signaling and messaging.  Right now the big growth opportunity appears to be using data "subcarriers" on digital TV and radio for out-of-band alerting, which allows much better targeting of alerts to affected audiences only.

Art