In Part 3 of his deep-dive into the recent EAS decision, Touchstone Consulting Group’s Gary Timm, a former broadcast engineer with experience in alerting, covered what the FCC left the same, updated an often-used acronym and discussed four rules that the commission eliminated. Timm has been analyzing the FCC’s 5th Report & Order on EAS.
Timm pointed out that aside from the elimination of the Governor-originated CAP alert, the agency also eliminated the Emergency Action Termination code as part of the presidential alerting process. The agency noted that the EAT was a holdover from when EAS station manual operation was the norm and does not translate well for automated operation, Timm states on the Alerts, Warnings & Response to Emergencies blog.
Earlier, in Part 2 of his analysis, Timm discussed what the FCC calls “intermediary devices,” which convert CAP messages to legacy EAS messages and then routed those messages to an existing non-CAP legacy EAS unit for airing. The commission clarified that if the intermediary device outputs the messages in legacy EAS protocol, then the device needs to be certified.