[From SBE National Headquarters] The 56th SBE National Meeting, planned to be held in Syracuse, NY on Sept. 22 and 23, will now be conducted via the internet. The event was to be held in conjunction with the SBE Chapter 22 Broadcast & Technology Expo. Chapter 22 has announced that this year’s event has been canceled due to restrictions imposed by the state of New York due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. SBE will hold a combined Annual Membership Meeting and National Awards Presentation via the internet at 4:00 p.m. PT on Wednesday, Sept. 23. Details on how to watch the on-line program will be shared soon via the SBE website, SBE-news email newsletter, and social media.
Category Archives: National
Is Your Mom’s Flip Phone Still Working?
Chris Aamodt, former senior engineer at KFMB Stations, recently sent a message saying that his elderly mother’s phone suddenly stopped working. After some time with Verizon customer service, he learned that they were no longer supporting their CDMA network in his rural Romona neighborhood.
It turns out that Verizon and AT&T are working to update their systems toward 5G and retiring the old 3G CDMA tower systems. These networks have issued warnings of impending obsolescence, but in the meantime, if a legacy 3G system fails, they seem to be replacing them with a new 4G LTE transceiver.
Sprint recently merged with T-Mobile and that’s a whole other mess, with Sprint’s legacy CDMA and T-Mobile’s legacy GSM networks working to update to LTE and 5G.
While broadcast engineers may be working with a backup data hotspot served by one of the major mobile telecoms, it’s most likely LTE and not ready to fail. That said, we recommend checking just to make sure. And check on your parents’ old phone while you’re at it.
Sage EAS Users: Update Your FEMA Certificate
[Sage ENDEC Press Release] This message is from Sage Alerting Systems regarding your Sage Digital ENDEC model 3644. It applies only to users in the United States.
Action required before October 28, 2020.
A signing certificate used by FEMA to validate CAP alerts will expire on Oct 28, 2020, at 14:05:29 UTC. Sage has released a free firmware update that you must install to permit your ENDEC to continue to receive EAS CAP alerts from FEMA after that date.
This release also updates the SSL root certificates that your ENDEC must have in order to download alert audio files from state or county alert originators.
You must already be running the Rev95 release. Users without Rev95 stopped validating CAP alerts in November 2019, and have been unable to connect to the IPAWS server as of July 6, 2020.
Please read the release notes. The installation process is straightforward as described in the release notes. Installing this update will not change any of the settings on your ENDEC.
If you have any questions regarding this update, please email us at support@… or call 914-872-4069 and press 1 for support. If you get voice mail, please leave a message and we will call you back.
H.266 Standard Finalized
It seems that audio and video compression is undergoing its own version of Moore’s Law progression, halving the required storage space or transmission bandwidth every few years. The Versatile Video Coding (VVC), or H.266, standard finalized July 6, 2020, by the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET). The standard is said to have a 30 – 50% better compression rate than the HEVC H.265 standard adopted in 2013, which was about 30 – 50% better than H.264, adopted in 2003. Naturally, the math is complex and compression encoding and decoding times are pretty hefty right now, but you know how that goes–someone’s going to design a chip, and next thing you know it’ll be part of your earphones.
We’ll see if ATSC 3 NextGen will include the standard in upcoming set-top boxes and televisions. H.265 has had some trouble with patent quibbles, which could lead to accelerated adoption of the newer H.266 standard.
No National IPAWS EAS Test this Year
(From FEMA.gov) Due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) public health emergency reponse, FEMA will not conduct a national test of the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) this year.
FEMA is moving the next national test of the system to 2021 out of consideration for the unusual circumstances and working conditions for those in the broadcast and cable industry. Although systems remain in place for rapid automatic transmission of the test message by broadcast and cable operators, the follow-on reporting activities associated with a national test place additional burdens on technical staff that are already quite busy maintaining as close to normal operation as possible.
IPAWS is a national system for local alerting that provides authenticated emergency alert and information messaging to the public through cell phones and internet applications using Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), and to radio and television via the Emergency Alert System (EAS). Emergency officials across the country have sent more than 360 important safety messages on the COVID-19 pandemic to their residents via WEA and EAS.
FEMA is required by law to test IPAWS at least every three years. The national WEA capability was most recently tested in conjunction with the EAS in 2018.