[EAS] Main Studio Question

[Dave Turnmire]

On 2/1/2018 1:05 PM, Clay Freinwald wrote:
> Weather warnings should be for the forecast area served by this station -
> and not be imported from afar (yes, this happens)
Avoiding this is sometimes easier said than done due to limitations of 
decoders.  For instance, we have two LPs in market "B" that are 
monitoring the PEP in market "A", 100 and 130 miles away.  As you might 
imagine, the audio quality isn't the greatest at that distance, but 
fortunately, PEP audio isn't something that needs to get aired often.  
Except... that PEP is also an LP for market A, and it forwards NOAA 
Weather alerts.  Which, for us, includes RMTs a couple times a year.  
And of course there are counties along the border of these two 
operational areas and are served by stations in both markets.

The long-and-short of it is that the LPs in Market B often forward the 
RMTs from Market A because they receive those quicker than the NOAA RMTs 
from their local area.  A "race condition" we are all to familiar with 
from other cases such as National EAS tests.  When this happens, most of 
the broadcasters in Market B don't relay the RMTs because the listed 
counties aren't in their coverage area.  And those that do... including 
the market B LPs... are broadcasting crappy audio due to the distance 
involved.  For similar reasons, there are other occasions where alerts 
from the PEP station get aired in market B, even though better quality 
audio is available.

As far as I know, the DASDEC/Monroe products are the only decoders that 
allow us the flexibility of setting filters based upon the specific 
sources in addition to other criteria (event type, FIPS code, etc).  And 
that is a relatively recent development.  Before that, the SAGE was the 
king of filtering flexibility so that is what our LPs typically have.  
For now, we are left with poor choices for poor stations... live with 
the situation we have, replace the otherwise decent decoders with 
DASDECs, or add a second decoder in series with the PEP source to 
"pre-filter" it before it gets to the main decoder/encoder.

In large markets, the capital investment is a small part of the overall 
budget so presumably not a big deal.  But we don't have "large markets" 
in Idaho... and capital funds are hard to come by. Sure would be nice if 
other decoder manufacturers joined Monroe with adding filtering for 
sources.  And join them with implementing Monroe's "solution" to the RF 
before CAP issue discussed in other threads here.  Even the FCC has 
endorsed that approach.

Dave