[SBE] Fwd: NAB FM chip proposal

[Thomas Shanks]

In my experience, RDS performance in the presence of multipath, especially in downtown areas, is too poor.  The cell network is much more reliable indoors in downtown office buildings than RDS is.  The EAS duck farts, though, seem to receive rock solid everywhere.  I believe you would find much more success receiving the AFSK in a pocket device than the RDS.

Anecdotal experience isn't good enough, though.  Someone needs to quantify the reliability in terms of the percent of total population-time that an RDS or AFSK-receiving phone will pick up the message.  Formal research is needed.

Also of concern is how to deliver the alerts to the user without driving them nuts with severe thunderstorm watches for counties that they are not standing in.  All categories of alerts that are not serious disasters (tornado/tsunami warning, EAN, etc) should be optional and disabled by default, and alerts should only be delivered for the current county  Even Amber Alerts should be optional, as several of those a week (norm in GA) would be enough to cause a revolt.

If the phones all have FM radios in them, getting DirectBand-like information into the devices would then be possible if the device manufacturers want to add it.  This would provide interesting new content opportunities.  DirectBand, IBOC, etc are not reliable enough for time-critical life-and-safety, though.  This is best left to AFSK in the mono audio.

This begs the question: How will the device know which channel to listen to for emergency information that is pertinent to the local area?  The phone could receive a frequency list and county codes from the cell tower it was last connected to, even if that tower is for another network.  Alternatively, in the case that the remembered station list is clearly not lining up with the local area, RDS could be used to download this information and determine the most likely counties that the user is in, and this information could be remembered until new information is received.

How much battery power are we talking about here?  If we can just check for the EBS tone before the duck farts once a second, it might be pretty small.

I haven't read any proposals on the topic, so if my thoughts here are redundant of what has already been considered, then I apologize.

Thomas Shanks CBRE
WREK Atlanta, Georgia Tech Student Radio

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Rudman <rar01 at mac.com>

Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:31:22 
To: GRC GRC<sbe-governmentrelations at sbe.org>; EAS Committee SBE<sbe at sbe.org>
Cc: Chris Imlay<bfitpc at aol.com>; Poray John<JPoray at Sbe.org>
Subject: [SBE] Fwd: NAB FM chip proposal


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