Announcements, News, and other items of Interest

FEMA/FCC announcements at NAB 2010

During a panel discussion at an Engineering Conference session, speakers from FMEA and the FCC announced their intent to start the CAP compliance clock in September of 2010.

This news had been expected. Last year, FEMA had given several events they wanted to see happen before they would start the clock. These included the completion of the CAP protocol documents, the start of CAP conformance testing, and a demonstration of the ability of FEMA to send a CAP message to CAP/EAS devices via a national network. All of these things are now in place or have near-term completion dates:

  • OASIS is in the final stages of turning the CAP 1.2 draft into its final form. This will be the version that FEMA will accept that will start the FCC's 180 day clock.
  • A testing lab has been appointed to run the CAP conformity tests. The Sage Digital ENDEC has been through a pilot version of this test, to help verify the test procedures. Formal testing is expected to begin in June.
  • FEMA demonstrated sending a CAP message from a national server, in its booth at the NAB show. The Sage Digital ENDEC, along with other vendors, showed that a CAP message could be delivered to CAP/EAS devices from FEMA's DMOPEN server, located off-site in Mississippi and accessed from the show floor via the Internet. Those CAP messages, sent about every 15 minutes, contained text that was converted to Text to Speech and were played out as EAS messages. This was an effective demonstration of the answer to the question "where will broadcasters get alerts once the 180 day clock runs out". DMOPEN, to be renamed to IPAWS OPEN, is one such location. The Sage digital ENDEC is also compatible with other Internet CAP servers as well as non-Internet based delivery mechanisms.
At long last, CAP is coming together.

CAP 1.1 or 1.2

Although the FCC's 2007 2nd Report and Order gave 1.1 as the version of CAP that would be used, it now appears that the first version of CAP approved for use with EAS will be version 1.2. The differences are minor, and Sage will provide a free update of its software to work with CAP version 1.2 once the compliance clock starts.

Latest Version
The lastest version of the software, containing several new features for seeing the status of your ENDEC, such as alerts being received and pending alerts waiting to be sent, as well as new features for multi station relay panel users, is available on our firmware update page.

Printers
We've updated the list of printers that HP indicates are compatible with the ENDEC's printer driver.

Firmware Update

If your ENDEC has a version less than 1.0g, please install the latest update.

Digital ENDEC Users Guide and Reference Manual
The manuals page has the latest full version of the User's Guide and Reference Manual.

Industry Group announces EAS-CAP Implementation Guide
Sage Alerting Systems, Inc., is proud to be a part of the EAS-CAP Industry Group which recently announced its Recommendations for a CAP EAS Implementation Guide for the effective use and translation of the open, non-proprietary Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) for the next generation of broadcast EAS. We hope that FEMA will use this draft as input into its Implementation Guide. The Guide builds on EGIC's earlier work, the profile recommendation. The profile and the guide will assure interoperability between other compliant EAS equipment manufacturers and CAP version 1.2 origination systems.

Sage Digital ENDEC
Learn more on the products page.