SIOUX FALLS, S.D.: Sencore announced a partnership with PBS to deliver MRD 3187B modular receivers as part of their Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act compliance project.
The MRD is reportedly designed to allow PBS, its member stations as well as public television and non-commercial educational stations to employ next-generation emergency alert services.
The unit features four, independently configurable RF inputs, an output port supporting transport stream rates from 1.5 Mbps to 160 Mbps and a second Ethernet port for connecting with a member station's local area network, as well as to the PBS network operations center's national interconnect.
PBS will also use the technology to construct a redundant pathway from FEMA to commercial mobile service (CMS) providers to deliver targeted emergency warning text messages to cell phones across the U.S.
"Our partnership with Sencore is key to PBS's fulfilling its role in this new emergency alert service, and the 3187B is a critical piece of the project," said Aaron Silverman, communications director for the PBS WARN Project, in a press release.
The WARN Act, passed by Congress in 2006, established a system by which CMS providers can distribute emergency text messages to subscribers over a specific geographic region. Sencore’s MRDs would carry the original satellite transmissions, passing them to a transport data injector, placing it into the broadcast stream in minutes, without affecting the broadcast service.
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