LMS real time updates & database updates on weekends temporarily suspended until 5/30/22

REC will be temporarily stopping our eLMS real time updates and our daily refresh of the FCC LMS database on Saturdays and Sundays throughout the month of May.

Normally, REC's eLMS system polls the FCC's LMS system once every 20 minutes to look for broadcast applications that were just filed and then updates our systems including display on FCCdata.org, FCC.today, the NCE Window Tracking Tool and other applications in the REC universe. eLMS supports the display of the presence of all LMS applications and for FM engineering applications and most administrative application types in radio and television, eLMS parses and processes the content of the application.   Every morning, REC retrieves and processes a LMS raw data file from the FCC which is used to help true-up some of our parsed eLMS data as well as update the television engineering records.  

This series of temporary weekend outages are necessary to support our internal transition to eLMS Version 2, which is a completely re-coded version of the parser.  eLMS v2 is much more modular in design, taking advantage of the sectional archetecture of LMS applications and provides us with more substantial flexibility to adapt the system to better accommodate new forms (such as those that will be released on May 17) as well as to allow us to begin the journey into integrating television engineering applications into the eLMS environment. 

For more information about the eLMS environment, please visit recnet.com/eLMS.

Our planned launch of the eLMS v2 code into production is during Memorial Day weekend.  Depending on the filing trends after May 17, the launched v2 code may include some of the new LMS application types (such as STAs and digital notifications).  

We expect eLMS real-time updates (using the v1 archetecture) to operate "business as usual" on Monday through Friday during this time.  During this time, REC will be running each application filed through both the v1 and v2 environments to detect any issues with the v2 code (as well as address some issues with the v1 code that we can fix in v2). 

This temporary outage should have no impacts on a majority of the use of the REC systems.   This will not impact the updating of other FCC system data including CDBS, ULS (for amateur radio) and IBFS as well as the updating of Canada and Australia data.

If the work needs no longer require weekend outages, we will resume weekend operations, but still plan to move to the v2 code on Memorial Day. 

Date: 
Friday, May 6, 2022
Systems affected: 
FCCdata.org
FCC.today
eLMS
Issue type: 
Scheduled maintenance