[EAS] Serving Multilingual audience

[Dave Turnmire]

On 10/23/2017 10:00 AM, Ed Czarnecki wrote:
> Consider this - those who are wringing their hands about providing alerts in
> 20 languages are arguing about a scenario that nobody has actually proposed.
> But by focusing on this absurd case, the discussion of the primary case is
> being distorted.  If such an absurd proposal is floated in an NPRM, that can
> be addressed.  But really, the discussion should be simpler - about serving
> known audiences with emergency alerts in the primary language of that
> station.
I agree.  The point raised earlier on another thread about NOAA's 
support for Spanish language (or conceivably others) would seem worth 
exploring some more.  Adrienne suggested that if 10 stations shared in 
the cost of supporting a $10K NOAA Weather transmitter, NOAA would 
support that.  Maybe I'm showing my ignorance... but just how many 
markets are there in this country that have TEN stations targeting a 
Spanish language audience?  Maybe I'd be surprised by the answer, but it 
still wouldn't address all those markets with a Spanish speaking 
audience and one or two Spanish speaking radio stations.... which may be 
financially struggling already.

And... duplicating a bunch of NOAA weather transmitters seems a bit 
inefficient.  And given the limited number of NOAA frequencies, maybe 
technically challenging as well.  What I'm wondering is what NOAA's 
status is right now with supporting a usable CAP server for their 
alerts?  A few years ago I ran across the existence of a NOAA CAP server 
and made the mistake of setting up my station's EAS box to subscribe to 
its alerts.  That was a short lived mistake.  The CAP server was putting 
out text that wasn't necessarily comprehensible to humans... and wasn't 
remotely TTS compatible. Lots of abbreviations, punctuation, etc such as 
you have seen in other NOAA Weather products.

As far as I know, that CAP server still isn't something usable by 
broadcast stations.  Why not?  Do they have one that is?  Given that for 
many of us, NOAA is the principal source of alerts, wouldn't receiving 
them from an appropriate CAP server be preferable to getting it from a 
voice grade radio transmitter?  One that sometimes you can only receive 
marginally?  And wouldn't that be a more efficient way of disseminating 
Spanish language (or other languages if justified) than trying to 
duplicate transmitters?  If, as Adrienne suggests, NOAA has the means to 
provide an alert in Spanish, it would seem the most expeditious way to 
get most EAS alerts to a Spanish Speaking audience would be using a CAP 
server to distribute to broadcasters targeting that audience.

Dave