[EAS] Humans thwart disaster alerts - - URL

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

There you go, that's the sort of thinking I'm talking about!  Not sure how much that particular idea would help, but better to parse one polygon than to curse the system!

Seriously, is there any reason you couldn't do that?  Do our local universities and community colleges and high schools not have computer science students looking for meaningful projects?  The coding isn't that complicated... most programming languages and database systems nowadays have off-the-rack functions for operations like polygon intersection detects, point in polygon detects, and so on.

It also suggests that a useful way to assign sub-counties might be along station coverage contours.  I don't know if that's a good idea or not, but it's one I haven't heard before.

Of course the big problem is that there's no way for an analog stations to interrupt its program for only part of its listenership.  I've heard some suggestions of ways to leverage HD data and sub-channels, although that would require getting some cooperation from the receiver manufacturers.  But I can confidently guarantee that nothing will get improved until folks experiment.

Here's another thing... right now every time we activate EAS we have to go through many seconds of tones and data bursts, which make the interruption that much more obnoxious.  Might it make sense to seek a rules change to eliminate the two-tone part, which no longer has any technical function I'm aware of?   Maybe not on the first alert sounding, but thereafter when there are updates?

Taking that a bit further, as a weather system moves, rather than going through the whole in-band signalling ritual each time NWS moves an update, how about simply handling the updates as a voice announcement that says something like "The current weather warning has moved into the area of ..."?  That's one that I think stations could implement on their own authority without needing a waiver or rules change.

I don't claim to have all the answers.  Maybe ask your program directors to quit their bitching for a minute and come up with some ideas for what they'd like this content to sound like?

Art

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From: EAS <eas-bounces at radiolists.net> on behalf of Tim Stoffel <tim at knpb.org>

Its too bad we can't come up with an open-source program that could map polygons to portions of counties. This would filter an incoming NWS alert (through CAP, of course) and convert polygons into to EAS county regions. This would be compared against a table of the station's coverage such that if a station didn't (for instance) cover the northwest corner of a county, any alert for that area would not be propagated through to the encoder. This would be automagic, and no one would have to give the process any thought during a time of severe weather.  This might not completely solve our problems, but might help reduce needless alerts on a given station. In the process, it might get that county section data out there to the public.

Tim Stoffel