Changelog

The IPAWS/OPEN program office has advised all users of the All Alerts feed, including REC, to changes being made by the National Weather Service (NWS). 

As of July 21, 2023 (we only received the notice on July 27), the NWS is reducing the types of messages that they are sending to Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) and the IPAWS All Alerts feed, both of which are monitored by REC.  NWS will continue to send severe weather warnings but will discontinue sending other advisories such as watches, advisories, bulletins and statements.  

ISSUE

On Friday July 14, 2023, FCC.today stopped posting daily electronic documents (EDOCS) from the FCC.  The problem persisted to the Monday after.

ROOT CAUSE

FCC made a change in their Content API that discontinued support for XML.  

RESOLUTION

Coded and installed a new program that now receives the feed in JSON.  Test OK 07-17-23 03:25PM EDT. 

With the upcoming changes to LMS, the FCC has updated database table definitions on their 7/11/23 release causing some of our file parsers to not work correctly.  As a result, some availability from ENAC-FM (which is used to drive some of our channel searching tools) has not received updated information since 7-12-23.  This does not impact the data provided by LPFM.app (which is locked at the public notice cut off date) and does not impact the data used to produce the LPFM National Availability Maps.  

A user reported that FCCdata has not updated its amateur radio information in a long time.

We believe that it has to do with new security measures put in place by the FCC after the recent failure of ULS.  

As of 07-14-23 7:40 AM ET we are currently doing a full data update on amateur radio listings.  This involves a full download of the ULS database (as opposed to the daily updates) and then running the daily updates to make the system current.  

We have received reports that some users are unable to retrieve the FCC History Cards from the links in FCCdata.  To address this, we have identified two issues and have made the following changes:

Prior to electronic systems used to track broadcast applications, the FCC Broadcast Bureau staff would use index cards to track station data.  The FCC has made those cards available.

The REC Radio History Project converts the information into electronic format to be stored in the REC Datastore in the Radio History Project Database and eLMS. 

More information on the Radio History Project can be found at:
https://recnet.com/radio-history-project

EDOCS data capture:

EDOCS is the FCC's repository for daily releases such as public notices, decision documents, etc.  REC captures this data from an API once every 5 minutes throughout the day. This data is displayed on the desktop version of FCCdata.org as news items in the middle area of the page.

In this version of the Enforcement Actions (Dingers) system, we made the following enhancements:

The call sign entry has been moved to be the first entry on the search screen.  

The call sign entry will now accept a broadcast call sign.  The call sign used must be the station's current call sign, even if the call sign that was in effect for the facility at the time of the action was different. 

Prior to the FCC retiring the old Call Sign Reservation System, the FCC would issue a monthly document that showed all broadcast call sign change activities.  

Now with these applications being filed in LMS, they are picked up and supported by REC's eLMS system.  

REC has built a new database that will be used for tracking FCC enforcement decisions.  Those who listen to FCC.today, the podcast know that we refer to these as "dingers".  

The system will track the amounts of forfeitures and subsequent adjustments through forfeiture notices as well as consent decrees.  The system will also track enforcement actions that do not propose a forfeiture such as notices of violation and citations.  

Deployed a new internal application within REC that would be used to enter in information about a natural disaster (such as a hurricane) and to indicate the status of the FCC's Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS) at the county/FIPS level. 

Modified the REC Disaster Information Page (recnet.com/disaster) from being a static page to including dynamic content including:

ISSUE:

Some WEA alerts on the CAP Tool were showing with skeleton screens and no real information.

ROOT CAUSE:

The issue is with CAP alerts sent that are cancellations of previous alerts.  We have noticed that when some participants send cancellation alert messages to IPAWS, these alerts do not have an <area> section and as such, our systems cannot pick up full details about the alert being cancelled.

FIX:

The internal REC CAP Polling system will now monitor the FEMA IPAWS endpoint for Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) and on a temporary basis, the test data endpoint for WEA.  Data from each endpoint will have a unique alert type code in order to distinguish between test and live WEA.  

Validation of this functionality cannot take place until alerts are received either in the live or test data endpoints.  When the code is validated, we will remove the query to the WEA test endpoint and purge the database of all test alerts.