[EAS] PEP & KCBS

[Suzanne Goucher]

I've read Sean's reply to this message but didn't want this reply to get booted for quoting too much.

I used to work as news director for the lead station in the Maine EBS network, WFAU-AM in Augusta.  Our closest PEP station was WBZ-AM in Boston.  I think, under the old EBS plan (a copy of which I still have floating around somewhere), some southern Maine stations were required to monitor WBZ, and a separate daisy chain relay was built off of that.

I still remember how excited Antwane Johnson of FEMA was, five or six years ago (maybe longer), when he told me that Arbitron numbers showed Maine qualified to get a PEP station, based on population numbers.  I tried mightily to convince them to designate our state relay network, Maine Public Radio, but MPR has only FMs, and FEMA seems to prefer high-power AMs in major population centers, so they chose WGAN-AM in Portland.  So we built our secondary network off that.  I didn't have any stations report that they didn't receive the national test, so I guess I got the monitoring assignments right in the state plan. 

 On Aug 31, 2021, at 5:56 PM, Sean Donelan sean at donelan.com wrote:
 
 Just curious.  I'm sure FEMA (and/or the FCC) have several criteria for
 selecting PEP stations.  Anyone know what they are?  And why KCBS was
 selected, rather than KNBR or KGO?