[EAS] Disputed alert system gets upgrade after Wine Country fires

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

You aren't imagining it, Adrienne, it's confusing.  

There's what the FCC rules currently require, there's what the rules will require as changes already approved take effect over the next couple of years, and then there's what the carriers report that they're doing at present.  Unfortunately, folks who look up the current rules, or those who ask vendors that have their own competing products, may well get the impression that county-level alerting is still the reality of WEA.

Further complexities arise from the fact that different carriers have different network layouts and use different algorithms to select the cells and sectors to which they send alerts... and also from wide variation in the size of individual cells in different places. 

There's discussion of downloading the target polygon to the individual phones and letting each of them use their own GPS or whatever to filter for alerts that apply where they are.  However, there are questions about whose bandwidth will be used to transmit the polygon... will that count as part of the expanded 360-character message?  So I'm afraid WEA targeting is likely to remain a bit fuzzy around the edges for a while yet.  But it's definitely not as bad as some folks think.

Art
________________________________________
From: EAS <eas-bounces at radiolists.net> on behalf of Adrienne Abbott <nevadaeas at charter.net>

Art--
I don't understand this concern about WEA messages going to entire counties. Our CAP EAS tool allows state and local officials, our Authorized Originators, to draw a polygon around around an area of concern and their WEA activations will be sent only to the cell towers in that polygon and not the entire county.  I guess I've always assumed that any CAP program would do this because it's one of the most attractive features of WEA. What am I missing???

EAS activations, of course, go to stations with the county of concern in their list of Locator Codes, limited only by the vagaries of their broadcast signal.

Adrienne