Specific Area Message Encoding
NOAA Weather Radio EAS protocol used to activate weather-alert radios
Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) is a protocol used for framing and classification of broadcasting emergency warning messages. It was developed by the United States National Weather Service for use on its NOAA Weather Radio (NWR) network, and was later adopted by the Federal Communications Commission for the Emergency Alert System, then subsequently by Environment Canada for use on its Weatheradio Canada service. It is also used to set off receivers in Mexico City and surrounding areas as part of the Mexican Seismic Alert System (SASMEX).
History
From the 1960s to the 1980s, a special feature of the NOAA Weather Radio (NWR) system was the transmission of a single attention tone prior to the broadcast of any message alerting the general public of significant weather events. This became known as the Warning Alarm Tone (WAT). Although it served NWR well, there were many drawbacks. Without staff at media facilities to manually evaluate the need to rebroadcast an NWR message using the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS), automatic rebroadcasting of all messages preceded by just the WAT was unacceptable and impractical. Even if stations and others with the need were willing to allow for this type of automatic capture, assuming the events for activation were critical, there was no way for automated equipment at the station to know when the message was complete and restore it back to normal operation.
SAME had its beginnings in the early 1980s when NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) began experimenting with system using analog tones in a dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) format to transmit data with radio broadcasts. In 1985, the NWS forecast offices began experimenting with placing special digital codes at the beginning and end of every message concerning life- or property-threatening weather conditions targeting a specific area.
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This entry incorporates text from “Specific Area Message Encoding” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.