[EAS] NPT at KKNU

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

Deaf and hearing-impaired advocates would differ with you on that, Gary.  The practical implication of carrying legacy EAS messages instead of the version rendered from CAP is that they don't get the full incident-specific message in the TV crawl... which is also required in the rules, but not supportable in the legacy format.  Plus multi-lingual as Clay mentions, which isn't a requirement just yet but probably will be soon.

Now personally I'd have no objection to completing the transition to CAP, but that would eliminate the traditional audio-relay chain as a back-up, which a lot of folks are reluctant to do.  Also, the current CAP dissemination over the Internet is subject to "backhoe fade" problems... for example, here in California we have at least three sizeable regions where loss of a single fiber, due to a fire or a pole-crash, can isolate them from IPAWS, sometimes for days at a time.  So we need some sort of redundancy in the CAP distribution system, probably by satellite.  (I've seen some remarkable stuff being done with modern satellite gear lately... very small antennas and very inexpensive electronics.  We're well past the VSAT era in that field.)

But you've hit the nail on the head, Gary... the equipment manufacturers are working actively with FEMA, NOAA and the FCC to solve this problem in the least disruptive way possible.  Richard Rudman has a project down in Santa Barbara county testing out the analog-message-delay workaround right now.  I think we'll need that sort of real-world validation before asking the Commission to move ahead on the migration to a modern digital EAS.

Art
________________________________________
From: EAS <eas-bounces at radiolists.net> on behalf of Gary Glaenzer <glaenzer at frontier.com>

Under current rules, no

Unless and until the rules of the game are changed to make the CAP feed the
MANDATORY re-transmitted message, and until the equipment makers provide
software to allow the CAP message to take priority, either by interrupting
an outgoing message from a secondary source, or forcing a hold-off of
secondary sources for XX seconds to wait for a CAP message, we are wasting
our time with the 'who was first' dust-up.

UNDER CURRENT RULES............

----- Original Message -----
From: "Clay Freinwald" <k7cr at blarg.net>

> Gary -
>
> Very important for a couple of reasons -
>
> 1- If a participant relays the CAP Feed, it will likely be of better audio
> quality.
> This was the primary driver behind Washington State setting up it's own
> CAP
> Server a number of years ago.
>
> 2- Multilingual - We, like a lot of states, have a large number of
> non-English speaker.   Pretty hard to address them with an emergency
> message
> using legacy/SAME based EAS.    Our State wants to get these messages in
> Spanish so that Spanish formatted broadcasters can air them.
>
> That help?
>
> Clay
>
> Is it really THAT important which one 'won the race' ?
>
> I find this entire blow-up about the subject to be a Tempest in a Tea Cup.
>
>