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sameold: SAME/EAS Demodulation

Over-the-air weather alerts for your desktop or RPi.

This project provides a digital demodulator and decoder for Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME). SAME is commonly used to distribute weather alerts in the United States and Canada. It was originally developed for use with broadcast stations that carry analog audio signals, such as:

• NOAA Weather Radio
• Commercial FM radio broadcast stations
• Commercial television broadcast and cable networks

These stations participate in an emergency alerting network known as the Emergency Alert System, which disseminates alerts to the general public.

SAME messages are transmitted in place of the station's normal programming as an audio-only message. SAME messages include a digital header which separates them from the station's normal programming. The digital header is also sent in-band—encoded with an analog modulation to preserve it. SAME headers are modulated using two-level frequency-shift keying (FSK) and sent at a baud rate of 520.83 Hz.

This project provides a Rust library and executable for decoding SAME messages.

Disclaimer

This project is dual-licensed MIT and Apache 2.0. Read these licenses carefully as they may affect your rights.

This project has not been certified as a weather radio receiver or for any other purpose. The author strongly discourages its use in any safety-critical applications. Always have at least two methods available for receiving weather alerts.

Getting Started

Binaries

Binary builds are available on the releases page for a variety of platforms. Linux binaries are currently built against glibc 2.28 and should be portable to most distros.

Building

You will need a working rust toolchain.

To build and install binaries from this repository, run

cargo install --path crates/samedec
samedec --help

Then see the binary's README for further instructions.

Containerized Build

Containerized builds are available for any architecture supported by the official rust image. This example uses podman, but similar commands exist in other container managers:

DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 podman build . --tag samedec:latest
podman run --rm -it --userns=keep-id samedec:latest

Arguments to run are samedec arguments. See the binary's README for additional documentation.

Container binaries are not published at present.

Add SAME decoding to your own project

Add the following to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
sameold = "0.4"

Then read our API documentation.

Contributing

If you have a recording of a signal that you think should demodulate, but doesn't, please open an new issue. Either attach or link to your recording.

Please read our contributing guidelines before opening any issues or PRs.