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I'd noticed something was going on lately. I sent an email over two months ago to Environment Canada about a station near Brockville (VFK721) repeating its intro statement over and over again without a forecast and never got a reply from them. The station's still broken. I guess the stations are just stuck right now live transmitting possibly not even a forecast, just an endless station ID announcement.
Weather radio is a critical service, and even if traditional AM/FM or RF signals are deprecated, there should still be a way for anyone - no matter how remote - to get safety and meteorology information from the government. Given that its constant availability is more important than latency or bandwidth, it feels like an appropriate use for GEO satellites broadcasting down over a large area in the clear, such that any basic SDR and a cheap dish could grab the signal with minimal fuss.
Why was this done?
The current govt is on a bit of an austerity kick at the moment, particularly wrt staffing of public bodies. Would be surprised if this simply wasn't a casualty of that.
Serious question: might the solution be a satellite broadcast in the clear, a la DVB-S but for data, audio, or video? Weather radio is a critical service, and even if traditional AM/FM or RF signals are deprecated, there should still be a way for anyone - no matter how remote - to get safety and meteorology information from the government. Given that its constant availability is more important than latency or bandwid…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment
> Because it was the middle of the night, there were few people at local radio stations, all operated by Clear Channel with mostly automated programming. No formal emergency warnings were issued for several hours while Minot officials located station managers at home. North Dakota's public radio network, Prairie Public Broadcasting, was notified and did broadcast warnings to citizens.
If you wanted to make commercial radio even minimally acceptable as an emergency alert system you'd be... guess what... reinventing EAS and EAS-a-likes, except more expensive and less responsive! EAS never has to "Interrupt This Program" it can just get to the meat.
I'm starting to wonder how many Canadians are on Hacker News. This after seeing the BC Time Zone story as well as this one. Just curious, really. I'm wondering what the country breakdown is for Hacker News users.
If the Corporation is type S it is purely US citizen owned, but most are type C thanks to the great work by AMCHAM attracting global investment.
Notably, most science is done on UTC time... because politicians were always functionally ignorant about the collateral costs of arbitrary technology policy changes. Evey village usually has at least one idiot. =3
I'm starting to wonder how many Canadians are on Hacker News. This after seeing the BC Time Zone story as well as this one. Just curious, really. I'm wondering what the country breakdown is for Hacker News users.
Again, I am biased, but as far as HN bias goes, that ain't bad. These are amazing places chock-full of the coolest people.
After decades of the West Coast life I now live in rest of world, and wish that rest of world could be so lucky.
Serious question: might the solution be a satellite broadcast in the clear, a la DVB-S but for data, audio, or video? Weather radio is a critical service, and even if traditional AM/FM or RF signals are deprecated, there should still be a way for anyone - no matter how remote - to get safety and meteorology information from the government. Given that its constant availability is more important than latency or bandwid…
I'm starting to wonder how many Canadians are on Hacker News. This after seeing the BC Time Zone story as well as this one. Just curious, really. I'm wondering what the country breakdown is for Hacker News users.
I think the HN population is more distributed geographically then you'd initially think