I was working in my office yesterday when I heard the familiar emergency alert dual tones coming from another room. It didn’t fully register with my conscious mind until it happened again. I found on my Verizon Droid X2 device notification of potential flash floods in the desert and mountain areas. An app called Emergency Alerts had been triggered.
Media sources reported 700 lightning flashes, and the rains did fall by the inch in the desert east of San Diego County, creating dangerous driving conditions and flash flood danger in desert gullies.
Of course, the problem is that the information wasn’t properly regionalized. This is a great step toward enlarging the alert system beyond broadcasting to personal communication devices and desktop computers, but users are likely to block notifications if are irrelevant. That crying wolf thing.
Verizon says it knows of the problem and will work to do a better job of matching location of the emergency to the location of its customers.
The National Weather Service provides the alerts and maintains an information page on the subject. They don’t detail how they are handling CAP location data.
The National Football League (NFL) has assigned the Game Day Coordinator job in San Diego to Gary Stigall, Chapter 36 Certification and Program Chair, and owner of SignalWiz Consulting. Work begins immediately, preparing for the home preseason game against the Green Bay Packers Thursday evening, August 9th. Gary will be assisted by Phil Wells, owner of Giant Step Communications.
The job of the Game Day Coordinator is to assure lack of RF interference to field and media wireless communications during local NFL football games.
Voting for candidates to serve on the 2012-13 SBE Board of Directors is ongoing. Members of SBE are able to vote online for the first time in society history.
Voting members should have an email from Intelliscan, the company conducting the election, sent the morning of July 26. The email contains a unique link to the member’s ballot. To vote, open that email and click on the link.
Two reminder emails will be sent to members in August who have not yet voted. Each of those messages will also contain the unique link to the member’s ballot.
Members who opted out of electronic voting are receiving ballots in the mail. All electronic ballots must be cast by the deadline of 4:30 p.m. EST on Tuesday, August 28. Paper ballots must be received at the SBE National Office by that same date and time.
The SBE Board of Directors consists of volunteers that govern the society. All four officer positions and six of the 12 director seats are being contested this year.
Broadcasters looking to save money continue to seek creative solutions to bringing remote event audio and video back to the studio. In order to bypass expensive ENG microwave or satellite systems, TV stations are exploring technology bonding several 3G or LTE mobile wireless feeds for their HD video uplinks. But there are challenges: How bulky will it be? Will it work in a busy breaking news environment? Will it work in the desert where towers are far away?
Arizona’s ATCi will bring its LiveStreamPac to San Diego for a technology presentation and demo. While several bonding systems have appeared in the past couple of years, this solution weighs only 2.5 pounds and works in a mobile wireless environment where sufficient bandwidth availability is increasingly realistic. This might just work.
Join us Wednesday, August 15, at noon at TV Magic, 8112 Engineer Road in Kearny Mesa, San Diego. ATCi buys a light lunch. Members and guests welcome, as always. We expect to be finished with the presentation by 1:30PM.
