A National Dialogue on the Emergency Alert System EAS Audio Quality

What would it take to receive the national level test from Sirius-XM and Directv? If a station/cable was willing to subscribe would the EAN alert be available? Would'nt this be a good redundant national level source?

Using Cell Phone Servie to send messages to numbers in an affected area.

The Best Practices should contain a recap of the two basic EAS operating modes, manual and automatic, and how the automatic mode relates to the FCC's definition of unattended operations. The point is that stations running in the manual mode must truly be able to respond to incoming EAS events in a timely manner in compliance with Part 11.

At 2pm, a great majority of the country’s breadwinners will be engaged in their breadwinning without access to radio or TV, satellite, cable or otherwise – as these are not maintained in most offices or conference rooms by employers. These vectors of communication, while still necessary, are losing ground to, and for some people (my home) have been completely replaced by web enabled tools and media. I suggest opt-in ...more »

Perhaps a way may be found to allow amateur radio emergency nets and 2 meter repeaters to carry the audio of the test. I'm an emergency communications coordinator for my local church and would appreciate a way to be included.

Bob Paine, KA3ZCI

A big thank you to everyone for your support and great ideas. The responses from this community have not only enhanced our working draft of the best practices guide, but the proactive dialogue across the country has truely been a national effort. Let us know what other topics still need to be addressed. Thanks again everyone!

While we complain of poor quality audio in EAS, the equipment is moving towards computer platforms. That means we now have sound card generated audio and consumer unbalanced audio I/O on EAS equipment. Can we achieve an audio quality similar to that of our normal programming with this equipment?

It seems that the process for receiving alerts is rather closed. In this day and age there is plenty of evidence that open sourcing has many advantages in creating systems that are more functional, more reliable and at a lower cost. Why does it seem that the requirements are more for a "system" rather than the level of functionality? The system should be less involved with specific hardware and much more software based. ...more »

What are the best ways to switch multiple station audio with a single EAS device?

Good ideas mixed with to much government control of broadcasting. None of this should be mandatory for anyone. Everyone should have a opt out switch so control of their station is never lost. This has a great deal of negative hidden consiquences. The public should be informed of how much power is given to the government in this case.

An observation for stations that don't broadcast an EAS activation but go right to live news coverage when there's an activation--a local emergency manager told me that he expects consistency when it comes to emergency information. He wants the public to get the information from the emergency official first and not some reporter's interpretation of what the emergency official said especially when that reporter is not ...more »

For the national test was the AT&T conference bridge at Blue Ridge used to send the EAN message to the PEP stations?

I would like to suggest that in addition to carrying national EAS on the NPR Squawk (News Advisory) channel that NPR also carry EAS on "Squawk Net", the Breaking News Channel. NPR stations could then monitor the Breaking News Channel on their Endecs and have a direct line to national. This would improve audio quality across the country ... at least on NPR stations and any stations that monitor them. The NPR News Advisory ...more »

I watched this video from Jamie Barnett (link below) and he states the National Test could be much longer in length up to 3:30. I know the Sage ENDEC units can only handle 2:00 minutes and will terminate the test after that. Will the test be longer? If so, someone needs to inform FEMA that the test needs to be limited to 2:00 of audio not a second more. Here's the link: http://www.nab.org/documents/landingPages/barnett_fcc.asp ...more »

CAP should not be required until the Next Generation EAS system is fully implemented and tested. CAP compliance can be voluntary till the entire system is hardened and emergency personnel as well as broadcasters have been given time to become familiar with it. Part 11 should not be modified and equipment should not be mandatory until the time that the Next Generation EAS system has been developed and implemented on a ...more »