[EAS] concerning the request for new weather Event Codes

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

Richard, I'm not suggesting a radical rework of the EAS legacy protocol here, although I think that's bound to happen eventually.  My thought here was more incremental, that by reducing some of the fanfare that precedes an EAS message we might mitigate the effect of multiple interruptions.  As you rightly remind us, the two-tone Attention Signal still had a technical rationale fifteen years ago... I'm just suggesting that it might be time to check back and see if it's still necessary to play eight seconds of it before every alert.

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From: eas-bounces at radiolists.net <eas-bounces at radiolists.net> on behalf of Richard_Rudman <rar.bwwg at gmail.com>

Art:

Are you begging the question to "unbake" the present EAS protocol? I think a lot of us would be interested in pursuing that.

However, you may remember from our PPW days that this issue came up. We learned that back in 2002 or so there were still legacy alert receivers in many schools and other public places and schools that only responded to the two-tone attention signal.

I would hope that by now that situation would have changed, but we can't make that assumption unilaterally.

We also do not know for sure that the single tone that the NWS NWR system had used for years could still be lingering on in some local NWS regions. EAS messages that aired the two-tone, the single tone, and the digital header were once possible here in CA.

I have not heard as much boilerplate language on NWS NWR EAS after we raised that issue a couple of years ago. With the two minute time limit for EAS messages it was not uncommon for the message to time out before it completed.

All in all, we have seen progress as this dialog has unfolded over the past three years. And for that I am both grateful and encouraged for the future.

Richard Rudman

> On Jul 7, 2016, at 7:14 PM, Botterell, Arthur at CalOES <Arthur.Botterell at CalOES.ca.gov> wrote:
>
> I think the EAS two-tone has become sort of the U.S. equivalent of SEWS.  But it only takes a second or two for people to recognize either sound, viz. how the two-tone is used in WEA.  Of course the EAS data bursts are probably equally recognizable, and those actually serve a technical purpose in the EAS "in band" signalling scheme.  Would many people weep if the two-tone went the way of switching the carrier on and off?

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