[EAS] A rogue EAN

[Richard Rudman]

I want to comment on the EAS incident thread by introducing some history. It seems the thread may be devolving to questioning why we still have Primary Entry Point (PEP).

PEP was devised based on studies on something called "government continuity" dating back to President Eisenhower's administration 60 years ago.

Continuity of Government (COG) is the principle of establishing defined procedures that allow a government to maintain its essential operations during and after a truly catastrophic national event. One aspect of the COG studies looked at what would happen to the fabric of our democracy if communications broke down and the public began to doubt if the U.S. government had survived. While the original deployment of PEP stations was flawed, and the original telephonic links proved to not work well, the basic need for PEP (or something very much like it) will not go away.

A reliability analysis concluded that AM radio was the best "last ditch" way for our government that survived a catastrophe to make itself and its intentions known to the surviving public. AM radio was originally deemed and has remained highest on the list of mass communications modes that would be most resilient and likely to survive major impairment to the usual ways for our government communicates with us. PEP was born out of a need for FEMA to feed stations without using what was available at the time for day-to-day use, broadcast network lines.

While the name for what we call the broadcast national emergency alert and warning system (CONELRAD, EBS, EAS) has changed, the driving government continuity need has not gone away. Lately, some of us have been trying to make the case against total digitalization of AM radio. Increased reliance on the public internet, cell phones, and other advanced communications technologies can leave us isolated and therefore vulnerable when they are disabled or impaired. Or, if public utility power fails; that makes those advanced technologies partially or totally useless to reach a powerless public.

So, some of us really believe that amplitude modulation broadcast radio will still be for a while the technologically simplest and most reliable way to transmit and receive life safety information when all else fails. The bright, shiny objects of digital technology are great when they work. When lives and property preservation depend on those objects with no fall back system, we are in trouble.

Richard 
 

>On Dec 26, 2020, at 12:37 PM, Clay Freinwald <k7cr at blarg.net> wrote:

>PEP sources seem to have fallen in and out of vogue over the years. At least
>on the station engineer level.