WASHINGTON, D.C. — A quartet of educational non-commercial broadcast media stations will be eligible to receive a combined $1.8 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to upgrade their equipment in order to provide enhanced emergency alerting to their respective communities.
- Northern California Educational TV, licensee of KIXE-TV in Redding, Calif., is able to receive up to $857,105 to upgrade its overall transmission signal, increasing emergency alert access.
- St. Lawrence Valley Educational Television Council, owner of WPBS-TV in Watertown, N.Y., may receive up to $276,444 replace an aging transmitter. This would make the station fully ATSC 3.0 ready and provide a stronger signal, reaching more communities including Kingston, Ontario, and highly rural areas of the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York.
- Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs’ KWSO-FM in Warm Springs, Ore., may use up to $158,749 in CPB funds to install and upgrade emergency alert equipment at the radio station and towers and to establish an alternate transmitter site in case of emergency.
- Texas A&M University-owned KAMU-FM and KAMU-TV in College Station, Tex., may use up to $486,214 to improve the resiliency of broadcast signal origination and boost redundancy of the station’s transmission and related emergency alerting in the Brazos Valley.
With these four, CPB has awarded 21 grants so far in the first round of funding for the Next Generation Warning System (NGWS) grant program, funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
In 2022, FEMA selected CPB to establish and administer the NGWS grant program to help public media stations across the country create a more resilient and secure public alerting system. The program is providing $34 million to public media stations to upgrade their equipment and receive training to enhance alerting and warning capabilities, including the ability to use NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0) broadcast technology and comparable digital broadcast technology for radio stations. The program prioritizes public media stations serving rural, Tribal, and underserved communities.
In June, CPB launched a Request for Applications (RFA) portal on the CPB website for a second round of funding. The total amount of NGWS grant funds available in this round is $48 million, approved in Fiscal Year 2023.
— Tracey Briggs
