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Closure of the Weatheradio service in Canada

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Re: Closure of the Weatheradio service in Canada

#31

Post by gpm »

amatecha wrote: post #20
gpm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand as someone who has gone on week long (and longer) hiking, kayaking, and most frequently canoeing trips in Canada I was completely unaware of this service, and would have been completely uninterested in it is I knew about it. We just take it as it comes and deal with it...

It's pretty good for backcountry hiking/camping (or offroading in general) where you are potentially hours away from any kind of cellular service. Some of these weather radio stations have (had?) pretty good coverage. A cheapo radio that can receive weather radio frequencies could last weeks on a single battery charge. It's great to know if my planned hike for the next day is possible or if we should make alternate p…

Yeah, forecasts are definitely pretty worthless past day 2 or 3, and I can see how someone could find it useful... but part of the charm with camping to me is definitely the decision making process being based on "look at the sky" and not "ask the technology". Definitely a personal taste sort of thing.

Re: Closure of the Weatheradio service in Canada

#32

Post by technothrasher »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #26
TutleCpt wrote: post #7

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.

Canada has an educated population, large online presence, and many folks operate within both the US/Canada under dual citizenship. One can find them in every field from medicine to high energy physics. 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 alw…

> If the Corporation is type S it is purely US citizen owned

Purely US resident owned, not US citizen owned. Resident aliens, who are not citizens, can have ownership in an S corp.

Re: Closure of the Weatheradio service in Canada

#37

Post by tokyobreakfast »

This is brain damage levels of decision-making.

If you live in a portion of the US that has severe weather, a NOAA weather radio with the EAS alerting function is a mandatory addition to your home. It could be the difference between life or death. See: first five minutes of Twister.

Inexpensive, AC powered with battery backup and it always works. No internet, no cell tower needed, which was likely just trashed by the storm you're trying to shelter from.

Fun fact these radios can warn you about more than weather. "Radiological Hazard Warning" and "Volcano Warning" to name a few.

Many more people died in decades past from severe weather and natural disasters precisely because of inadequate advance warning.

So naturally they would migrate people to...a replacement orders of magnitude more unreliable.

Re: Closure of the Weatheradio service in Canada

#38

Post by beloch »

TutleCpt wrote: post #7

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.

The breakdown probably varies according to the time of day. In the middle of the night (for North America) I'd expect to see a higher proportion of international users, although I'd also expect the numbers aren't quite so high since HN is U.S.-centric and predominantly English only.

The number of Canadians is relatively easy to estimate though, since the geographic distribution is similar and the majority do speak English. I'd expect a roughly 8.5:1 ratio of Americans to Canadians based solely on population.

Re: Closure of the Weatheradio service in Canada

#39

Post by autoexec »

msla wrote: post #24
stego-tech wrote: post #22

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…

Yeah. I'm down on commercial AM/FM radio being touted as an emergency service, because there's so rarely enough behind the scenes to make it reliable or even minimally usable as such, but this is something purpose-built to fill that role, and shutting it down means there's nothing which can fill it, given how worthless commercial radio is at the task: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment > Because it…

> 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

Exactly, whatever it costs to operate and maintain the emergency and weather services commercial radio would need to make enough money to pay for that, and then also make enough money on top of that to stuff their pockets with profit. The people shouldn't be on the hook for those extra expenses while private companies do everything in their power to degrade the service in order to lower their costs to increase profits even farther.

Re: Closure of the Weatheradio service in Canada

#40

Post by tokyobreakfast »

stego-tech wrote: post #22

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…

Serious answer: no.

Requiring line-of-sight outdoors to a satellite does fuck-all in emergency situations, especially one you're trying to shelter in place from, likely underground.

In the US, these broadcasts are localized, usually a county or multiple county area.

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