LRH Enterprises

As I wrote in another article, the WeathGet program retrieves the weather (from online) and inserts it into the OMT alert.txt file which is displayed by OnAir when the user clicks on the alert box.

Many times, the NWS weather doesn’t have a critical weather update, or we just don’t know how to interpret it. Since we have an EAS decoder, and it can send an email when an alert is received, I decided to use the EAS alerts to enhance the OMT OnAir alert box. I set up the EAS to send an email to a mail box on the server, and then wrote a little code, which cron runs several times an hour, to read the mailbox, and parse any alerts, making them available to the studio operator.

What happens is that the EAS message is parsed, and if it is not a “test”, as in weekly or monthly, it is added to a database table. The  WeathGet program then queries the table (through some php code magic) and if an alert is still active, inserts it into the alert.txt file, showing the areas affected and the start and end time of the alert. This appears above the weather report portion of the alert.txt file. I also insert a notice into the alert box displayed at the top of the OnAir screen, to alert the operator that something is happening.

The parser process also deletes any expired alerts, just to keep things clean. A message is also sent to the chief operator if any EAS alerts being parsed are not recognized, which seems to only happen with badly or differently formatted messages. RWT amd RMT messages are ignored (and deleted), everything else is stored.

As an additional feature, I am able to display the alerts on the web page I use to provide additional data.

The programs have been in place since January and have been working great ever since.