[EAS] concerning the request for new weather Event Codes

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

You're right on the money, Tim.  Alas, the Wireless Emergency Alerts system for cellphones doesn't leverage the location awareness of phones.  Instead the carriers try to pick cell sites and sectors to match the targeting polygon, which is an imprecise process at best.

Broadcast alerting to location-aware receivers was the ideal that CAP was designed toward, for a number of reasons including the "location of interest" challenge.  It frequently happens that people have a vital interest in events at a location other than the one they currently occupy... a business location, a child's school, etc.  If transmission of an alert is limited to the target area, only people who happen to be nearby their LOIs can possibly get the alert.

So how might CAP messages be broadcast?  On HD FM stations... that's been demonstrated at NAB several years now.  Also over digital TV transmitters... FEMA demonstrated that in the Washington DC area in 2004-5, and that technology has moved on to datacasting maps, pictures and even video in DHS-supported demos in Houston, Chicago and Washington DC.  Direct-broadcast satellite?  Almost overkill!

The technology absolutely exists.  The real challenge is getting device manufacturers to deploy it.  They generally perceive their incentive as being to do the absolute minimum that's required of them by government.  Perhaps some of our market fundamentalists can suggest how else phone manufacturers and programmers could be persuaded to do something better than what we have now.

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: eas-bounces at radiolists.net [mailto:eas-bounces at radiolists.net] On Behalf Of Tim Stoffel

This discussion is sounding more and more like the need to alert and the ways of alerting are like fitting square pegs into round holes. Short of having geographically aware, personally addressable message receivers (which cell phones can do or nearly do, but at this point, not well), nothing is going to work the way the emergency managers hope it will work.

There is no free lunch.

Tim Stoffel

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