Re: A real EAS system

[Aaron Read <aread@speakeasy.net>]

At 10:41 PM 3/19/2003 -0500, Dan Billings wrote:
>NBC reports that in Israel they have a silent radio channel that only comes
>on when there is emergency information.  At times of crisis, like these,
>Israelis are told to leave the radio on that channel when they go to bed and
>emergency information will be broadcast when needed  -- waking up those that
>have left the radio on.
>
>I have always thought that the EAS system would be useless in the middle of
>the night when most people are asleep.  The Israelis have thought of a way
>to solve that problem.
>
>-- Dan Billings, Bowdoinham, Maine


I would imagine that AM/FM radio in general in Israel is far more 
government controlled than in the US...if not completely gov't-owned.  As 
such, it's inherently less valuable and therefore there's less revenue lost 
by maintaining a "silent channel" nationwide.

Not to mention that Israel is, what?  The size of Maine, if that?  It's a 
lot easier when you've only got to have one or two transmitters/allocations 
to cover your entire country :-)

The coding of EAS does have provisions for automatically turning on a radio 
and tuning it to a specific channel.  However, thanks to our wonderful 
Congress never giving the FCC any teeth...there's practically zero 
infrastructure in the radios themselves to allow such a thing.   There is 
some planning with IBOC to use data service channels to control the radios 
in the event of a EAN alert on EAS.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aaron "Bishop" Read             aread@speakeasy.net
FriedBagels Consulting          AOL-IM: readaaron
http://www.friedbagels.com      Boston, MA