Station Compliance

47 CFR § 11.35(d) — the FCC’s program chain security rule — comes due September 29, 2026. It requires that the equipment carrying your EAS messages sits behind a firewall or comparable segmentation, that default passwords are gone, that software is current, and that somebody wrote down what was done.

None of that is hard. All of it is unfamiliar, and the stations it lands hardest on are the ones where the person who has to do it is also the morning host and the sales manager.

The Program Chain Compliance Kit is the implementation version: a 90-minute start-here path, the rule explained in plain English with the alternate authentication and network patterns spelled out, a device-by-device reference covering the boxes actually in these racks — Barix, Comrex, the encoder-decoders — and the worksheets that leave a paper trail behind the work. Nothing gets filed with the FCC. The record exists for the next person, and for the day somebody asks.

The reference material on the site is free and stays free. A station that reads the whole thing and does the work themselves is a station that did the work, which is the point.

Everything on the site was written by somebody who does his own rack work — STL, codecs, automation, transmitter remote control. That is the difference between a compliance vendor and a broadcaster: knowing which of these rules is paperwork and which one is a Saturday afternoon at the transmitter site.