April 18, 2003

Present:

John Franz, KVOS-TV; Russ Hill, KCPQ-TV/KTWB-TV; Roland Robinson, KSTW-TV; Mark Allen, WSAB; Ted Buehner, NWS Seattle; Jim Tharp, Entercom; Lowell Kiesow, KPLU-FM; Don Miller, WSEMD; Clay Freinwald, Entercom; Terry Spring, KWPX-TV; Bob Wyatt, KHQ-TV; Art Blum, KONA-AM/FM; Kris McGowan, FCC

Clay reported on the MRSC Meeting in the other Washington on February 21.

Don Miller reported on NAB. He attended the PPW meeting. They are working toward a unified warning system. They have some money available to improve warning systems. NOAA is leaning toward an internet based system. Over $1 million has been spent in Washington alone on EAS. We don't want to reinvent the entire warning system we have and have to spend a bunch more money. A goal is a GPS based system that is automatic and based on what we already have.

There was an EAS round table put on by the Nevada Broadcasters Association. They have two separate EAS systems in the state that they are trying to integrate. The Nevada broadcasters were looking for ideas from other states. They feel the system is no good. They were told how EAS works here in Washington. Nevada has small, isolated pockets of people, similar to parts of Central Washington. There is a notable lack of state involvement there, unlike here.

On April 24, there will be a joint Oregon-Washington EAS meeting in Vancouver. They will be fine tuning the cross state alert process.

The Washington AMBER Pilot Program in Washington was mentioned at NAB. The State is working on getting additional information to the stations over the web. The www.Earth91.org web site looks likely at this point. The WSAB, WSEM, police and more are involved in this. This would make the process paperless. The information, including text and pictures, would be entered directly on the web site. Other states are interested in this, also. The goal is to do it nationally. Some funds will probably be available on a national basis for this. A lot of the Earth911 funding comes from corporate sponsors.

The EAS monitoring assignments project is continuing. More blanks are being filled in.

The Kittitas County plan was distributed, and will be considered at the next meeting.

Some time was spent going over various tabs in the state plan. Revisions will be sent out on the remailer.

It was asked how Spanish language stations handle EAS alerts. It is legal for them to run RMT's in English. This was deferred to the next meeting.

The Eastern Washington annual meeting was held recently, and went well.

From WSEM, the recommended programming list will be on the remailer soon for recommendations. Further discussion was deferred to the next meeting.

From NWS, the recently installed transmitter at Capital Peak failed, and is being replaced. Baw Faw is running again. When Capital is back up, Baw Faw will be moved to Davis, which will operate on 162.525. NWS is also working on weather radio improvements for Bellingham.

In the North Puget Sound region, Skagit County is now on line. Coming soon is WHATCOM (pronounced com, not come), a new sheriffs dispatch center.

The EAS meeting at NAB is available for listening on broadcast.net.

Jim Tharp would like to get rid of the attention tones on the civil authority's tests. More research needs to be done on this.

From the WSAB, Goldendale wants to do its own AMBER plan. Coming soon is the AMBER review meeting. The recent AMBER alert in the Tri Cities will be discussed. The date has not been set yet.

Burk has finally come out with an update for their EAS box, and it appears to be working properly.

The next meeting will be Thursday, June 5th, at Camp Murray at 9:30 AM.