Digital Alert Systems Earns Patent On HALO System For EAS/CAP Device Management

Digital Alert Systems, a global provider of emergency communications solutions for media providers, today announced that it has received a patent on its HALO system for managing Emergency Alert System (EAS) and Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) devices.

The company said HALO qualified for a patent because “until now, there has never been a system designed exclusively for the unique requirements of managing EAS/CAP devices. HALO offers a vast improvement over general monitoring systems like Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) by providing logical and coherent system details to manage the devices along with uniform display and critical log aggregation.”

“HALO not only greatly improves the process of completing FCC reports, which is a requirement that can be very time-consuming to fulfill, but it can have other positive impacts throughout a media company,” said Bill Robertson, vice president of business development at Digital Alert Systems and the patent’s author. “For example, the ability to grant siloed access to information makes it possible to share that information among not just engineers and technicians but also management, compliance teams, and others. Even news and weather reporters can see what alerts are being received within each local community.”

Many broadcasters have dozens if not hundreds of EAS encoders/decoders scattered across different geographical regions and time zones. Moreover, there are fewer and fewer people looking after those devices, even though it is critical to ensure these important pieces of equipment are operating properly. FCC fines for inoperable equipment can be substantial and represent a monetary forfeiture coming right off the bottom line.

All those factors drove Digital Alert Systems “to develop an overarching solution that would help broadcasters understand operational readiness and centralize configurations while aggregating all-important FCC compliance logs.”

The HALO product communicates over a network with properly configured EAS/CAP systems deployed throughout a customer’s operational areas. The EAS/CAP devices are programmed to communicate at a user-defined time and transfer status information to the main HALO system. This information consists of a Healthbeat, which provides detailed information regarding key configuration values and settings of the device. If these parameters are outside of the set values, a series of warnings is displayed on the user screen to highlight a potential issue and call attention to one or more devices.

One of HALO’s biggest benefits, the company said, “is the extremely simple process of filing reports through the FCC’s Electronic Test Reporting System because test results across all configured stations are available within minutes of the test being received. No more having to contact each station asking for reports or sending logs to be culled and summarized. HALO can quickly output a text, Excel, or PDF file and send the information to a printer.”

The HALO system is designed to work initially with the Digital Alert Systems DASDEC and One-Net series of products. However, the company plans to expand the HALO system and extend its capabilities to other brands and models in the future.

As a software tool, HALO can support hybrid virtualization for stations and MPVD operators deploying DASDEC/One-Net devices at the network’s edge to capture EAS/CAP alerts.

U.S. patent 11620295 was issued for the HALO system on April 4, 2023.

“We are proud and pleased that our efforts in defining and designing the HALO system have proven worthy of a patent,” said Anne Wakeman, Digital Alert Systems COO. “We knew this would be an important time- and money-saving tool and, judging by the increasing interest and number of companies using HALO, it seems our customers recognize it too.”