[EAS] The best public alerting quality experience

[Kenyon, Alfred]

By using a monitoring service I've been able to view how the National IPAWS EAS Test was conveyed on a hundred or so television stations. Unfortunately not all stations include EAS activity on the feed as consumed by the monitor service so absence of an EAS interruption does not mean that their off-air and cable audience did not see/hear the test message. 

I noted that most Hearst TV stations I saw brought up a very nice background slide featuring "EAS" and "FEMA" with the DHS logo, and the words "This is only a TEST" above a representation of a tower. The same background slide was used at WPTZ-TV for the test in 2011.

I found a host of different issues with how the EAS message was presented to the public. It will be interesting to review the Form 3 responses from some stations that appeared to have issues. I found one station that ran both the scroll and data bursts from an old RWT that may have been queued up in their EAS box. I wonder if anyone at the station noticed?

There were many, many stations with clean, clear scoll and audio presentations. 

Here's a topic for further comment: 

Many TV stations simply duck the main program audio by a few dB during playback of EAS audio. While this may be acceptable for local alerts I question if this would be appropriate in the case of an actual Presidential EAS alert. If we should ever come to that point as a nation effectively arranging it so that the President is in a shouting contest with the testimony of Divorce Court would not be appropriate. Since processing of NPT is supposed to emulate the behavior of an EAN that is the current situation.

AL KENYON
IPAWS National Test Technical Lead
IPAWS Program Office, National Continuity Programs
Department of Homeland Security - FEMA
500 C Street, SW, 5NW-0407
Washington, DC 20472-3153
202-646-3308 Office
202-538-4471 Cell    
540-504-2389 eFax
Alfred.Kenyon at fema.dhs.gov