CBC Stops Broadcasting Official Time Signal (www.cbc.ca) 70
Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shares a report from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC): CBC and Radio-Canada have announced they'll no longer carry the National Research Council (NRC) time signal. Monday marked the last time it was broadcast, ending the longest running segment on CBC Radio. In a statement, spokesperson Emma Iannetta described the signal as a "wonderful partnership," but confirmed it's being dropped. Given the range of CBC platforms from traditional over-the-air radio, to satellite and the internet, the long dash undergoes a range of delays by the time it's heard, leading to accuracy concerns from the NRC, she wrote. Iannetta added that nowadays most people use their phones to get the time, though many CBC listeners have a "fondness" for the signal.
For many, the relationship with the time signal goes far beyond fondness. It's allowed sailors to set their instruments for navigation, kept railway companies running on time and helped Canadians stay punctual. In a 2019 interview with Day 6 on the occasion of the signal's 80th birthday, Laurence Wall, one of its current voices, reflected on its origin and importance. His memories include taxi drivers recognizing his voice from daily announcements and hearing from a young man living in Hong Kong who would stay up past midnight just to hear the time signal because it reminded him of home. Beyond emotional connections, the signal has a practical history too. Wall said when it started out, timekeeping was relatively primitive, with watches and clocks that needed to be regularly set in order to stay accurate.
For many, the relationship with the time signal goes far beyond fondness. It's allowed sailors to set their instruments for navigation, kept railway companies running on time and helped Canadians stay punctual. In a 2019 interview with Day 6 on the occasion of the signal's 80th birthday, Laurence Wall, one of its current voices, reflected on its origin and importance. His memories include taxi drivers recognizing his voice from daily announcements and hearing from a young man living in Hong Kong who would stay up past midnight just to hear the time signal because it reminded him of home. Beyond emotional connections, the signal has a practical history too. Wall said when it started out, timekeeping was relatively primitive, with watches and clocks that needed to be regularly set in order to stay accurate.
Still available by phone! (Score:5, Informative)
You can still call the NRC [canada.ca] and get the talking clock in French or English.
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WWVB is in Colorado but it hits Canada too. [wikipedia.org]
Re: Still available by phone! (Score:2)
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Not in Maryland either. I have a bunch of clocks that use it to set time, it works only at night well.
At least it's something.
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All these systems have been declining in popularity due to GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems, e.g. GPS and Galileo) providing much more accurate time, and not being subject to the same propagation issues as terrestrial systems. Error can be in the sub nanosecond range, and you can also derive an extremely accurate frequency reference from it.
Low frequency time codes like WWVB, DCF77, JJY and the like are still used in a lot of consumer clocks, mostly due to extremely low cost. Accuracy is enough for
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"Good enough for wall clocks" is my standard for WWVB. I never set a clock anymore.
GPS makes a fine time source if you can't do NTP.
Using the chimes must have been a labor of love :-)
Is the radio location system similar to LORAN? I lived next to a node for a long time when I was a kid, huge infrastructure required to keep it running.
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The system is LORAN, yes. The hope was that with some modifications or a better receiver, it would provide sub microsecond timing. It's probably impossible though. You can account for propagation delays and multipath to some extent, but never enough to be reliable.
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Exactly. The rise of GPS and other GNSS systems has made global distribution of time trivial - if you need an accurate clock, there are GPS-slaved time receivers that will lock onto it. Basically every laboratory around the world synchronizes with GPS time these days.
WWV/WWVB (and Hawaii at WWVH) is a popular HF state that's available worldwide (it's HF at 6/10/15 MHz) as well as the low band around 15-30kHz or so (this is what "atomic clocks" use), but you're subject to propagation issues since the signal
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WWV/WWVH are on 2.5/5/10/20 MHz, not 6/1020. I believe Radio Havana still transmits on 6.000 MHz, at least sometimes.
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Don't most modern low-stratum time servers take their time from the GPS signal?
I'm sad the CBC is no longer broadcasting the time signal, though. I remember it growing up as we'd be driving in the car and it would come on. It was a part of Canadian identity.
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> It was a part of Canadian identity.
I think anyone outside Canada will find that weird, but the statement is very true.
Re: Still available by phone! (Score:3)
As a Canadian I find it odd.
But then again, I grew up on the west coast, and find the love for cbc to increase the further east I go.
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I can't remember if they did it every hour, but it was always right before the news, so I always identified it with the newscast, and always checked my watch to see if it was slow (it always was). That is of course, when you needed watches to know the time. Was I ever happy to switch to a cellphone and then smartphone... I figured nobody would still be wearing them except for antiques or expensive ones . I never figured on smartwatches.. with a one inch screen who'd want to use them? But, I guess lots of fo
I am shocked! Shocked! (Score:1)
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This is due to the increasing digitization of everything - it adds all sorts of latency to everything. During the Olympics it was fun seeing the "cheer wave" that happens - those watching OTA cheered first, followed by cable users (the cable company got the feed from OTA and digitized it), followed by phone TV users (whose broadcasts often had a 10 second delay to them).
I'm sure the CBC transmits the audio digitally to everyone acros
Re: Still available by phone! (Score:4, Informative)
Or you can tune your shortwave radio to CHU and get the time from NRC that way. It is on 3.33, 7.85 and 14.67 MHz.
CHU (Score:5, Informative)
They even ask for reception reports and give out "QSL" cards.
Even with delays, these stations like WWV are still accurate enough for many purposes, and they serve a secondary purpose as frequency standards.
Re: CHU (Score:2)
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Thank heavens! I first thought that this article was about CHU... Whew!
I had to look it up to make sure there wasn't a typo. Those time stations have a lot of non time uses, like propagation assessment, and of course just making certain the radio is working and on the correct frequencies.
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Indeed, I am looking at a QSL card from CHU, I got all three frequencies in the space of about 5 minutes, even 3330, at about 10 in the morning from a field near Sacramento. Zenith Royal 3000-1 with the stock pole antenna.
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Indeed, I am looking at a QSL card from CHU, I got all three frequencies in the space of about 5 minutes, even 3330, at about 10 in the morning from a field near Sacramento. Zenith Royal 3000-1 with the stock pole antenna.
The 3300 is pretty impressive for that time of day. QSL cards are kinda fun, although it can get pretty expensive mailing after a while. Especially with some amateurs in faraway places who want money/IRC's to send you one in addition to your stamped self addressed envelope.
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I was rather surprised, it was noisy but readable. I couldn't get either WWV or WWVH on 2500 or 5000, for some reason. Vagaries of air-variable tuning caps?
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I was rather surprised, it was noisy but readable. I couldn't get either WWV or WWVH on 2500 or 5000, for some reason. Vagaries of air-variable tuning caps?
Must have been some kinks in the ionization layers that affect propagation that day. 2500 is reasonable to not hear, 5000 should have been readable if 3000 was. At this point we have a number of things that affect propagation, from sunspots and solar activitiy, and even the time of year. We're transitioning into fall propagation right now. So things can get erratic at some points.
My best guess is that the so called D layer, which tends to absorb signals in this frequency range, was not fully formed that
I have a question (Score:5, Funny)
If technology has made timekeeping so darn accurate nowadays, why is my wife's sense of time as bad now as it was 40 years ago?
Re:I have a question (Score:5, Funny)
If technology has made timekeeping so darn accurate nowadays, why is my wife's sense of time as bad now as it was 40 years ago?
That's because you haven't realized that a person's time sense is made up of two things. The actual time and the Personal Delta Time (PDT). The PDT is the time delta between the real time and what the person thinks the time is. After being set in childhood, a PDT does not vary during a person's lifetime. Your only hope is to change all the clocks in your house by the PDT number and not allow her to view actual times on smartphones/etc so that your wife can function in a normal time sense. Now that will screw you up but hey, as long as your wife is happy and on time.. ;)
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Ah, thank you. Is there an RFC about Personal Delta Time I can reference to learn more?
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Ah, thank you. Is there an RFC about Personal Delta Time I can reference to learn more?
I understand that if you are married you are taught all about it over time ... and then it is assumed that you understand and abide by it.
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The longer I'm married, the less I understand.
Or, perhaps it should be - the longer I'm married, the more cognizant I am of how little I understand.
Re: I have a question (Score:2)
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> After being set in childhood, a PDT does not vary during a person's lifetime
That is either incorrect or ignores another modifier that is adjusted upwards as you age, thus allowing Christmas last to feel like it was 4 weeks ago when you find you have to get Easter eggs, then after that all the birthdays in June, August and September have you rushed off your feet because there is only some blisteringly fast few weeks between them and boom you have xmas again and you wonder why not just skip every other x
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Your sense of the passage of time is a mix of environmental cues and quantity of novel memories formed.
So... maybe your wife finds you boring! /Science rules!
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So... maybe your wife finds you boring!
After all these years, that wouldn't surprise me at all!
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Because you married her just last week.
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Shh! I don't think her dad reads this site, but I'm not 100% sure!
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Well, when was the last time you upgraded the model?
There's your problem!
AI Will Make The Seconds Longer From 9-5. (Score:2)
And then shorten the rest to make up for it, and you won't even notice it.
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Time to start working nights.
Yay for flextime!
I did not know... (Score:3)
... that I would feel nostalgic about this. I do listen to quite a bit of CBC radio.
Sort of plugs into the same neurons as the classic hockey night in Canada theme.
Re: I did not know... (Score:3)
It's wild to think that the CBC won't exist in a few years time.
Big mistake (Score:2)
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It's way better to use GPS. Identity/authentication systems like Kerberos (used on e.g. Windows) rely on precise time to work correctly, as do NFS filesystems. As mentioned elsewhere relay stations (often satellites) introduce seconds worth of delays. Have you ever seen a broadcast on TV where the TV signal itself is in the background of the image? You can actually see the image in the background is like a second late - and that signal is local!
GPS is also broadcast so no reason to rely on regular radio. We
Re:Big mistake (Score:4)
Thing was, you could throw together a radio out of a chunk of rock, a razor blade, bunch of wire and a crappy headset that would pick up the time signal. GPS requires much more technology to use, things like electricity to start with and that time signal was good enough to roughly figure out your longitude.
BBC R4 (Score:4, Informative)
> the long dash undergoes a range of delays by the time it's heard, leading to accuracy concerns from the NRC
BBC R4 also had this concern with the "pips". DAB radio, Freeview, streaming all add random and massive delays. In fact with DAB and Freeview I find it fun to see how that delay varies between devices. I have two LG TVs for example, with both on you can hear a difference in the time each takes to process and decode the broadcast, it is actually quite large, about 15 seconds between them. Surprisingly its the bigger and newer set that takes the longest. My DAB alarm clock and the DAB portable radio also show a HUGE difference. The alarm clock is actually about 30-40 seconds behind the other radio.
Streaming the stations via an app, the delay is in minutes, at least 5 or so! Not to mention that if you go through a not spot the app winds back several mins and replays the audio you heard 5 mins before that, thus I've found I was re-listening to part of the same interview, which was pretty confusing.
The most accurate time signal (when using the pips or the Big Ben Bongs on R4) is over analogue radio, both FM and AM. Thanks to the sheer prevalence of FM radios these days FM isn't going anywhere so if I really need to use a radio to check the clocks (that includes the phone, more below) I could just use that.
My DAB radios and Freeview TV's set their clock from a broadcast time signal, that is more accurate considering the delays there, but as with the mobile phone (more below) you can only trust it to a point.
Syncing via NTP is proven and trustworthy so as long as I'm sure my PC has synced then I can use it's clock, but only if I sync to ntp.org. At work many machines sync with a domain controller and I see instances where they simply fail to get the right time from it!
I usually use the PC in a pich, the talking clock of the PC is off, or one of my radio controlled clocks which set themselves to the second using the MSF time signal. I prefer radio controlled clocks, I can use them to check anything else whenever I need to. If they are not getting a signal, they tell me! And that signal is THE time signal that all others apart from GPS are based.
> Iannetta added that nowadays most people use their phones to get the time
I rarely do that. I wear a watch, no need to wear out my phones power/home button to check the time. Besides, I have found that the time sent via the mobile networks needs checking itself. I have issued many phones to employees over the years on many networks and have learned that some phones and some networks are terrible with time. At times whole networks have failed to send accurate time to the phones, or I have had mobiles that simply cant do it! They totally fail to set the time and either need you to manually set it, thus forgetting the time when the battery dies or they drift.
I use the time on the phone like I do on DAB or Freeview, it *should* be accurate but someday it may not be. The pips on FM, the MSF clocks, NTP, all are my goto accurate sources.
Till I started working in IT I would have thought having accurate time was for oddballs who divided up their day into timeslots. When I started working in IT and you get older, guess what I started to become?
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I have issued many phones to employees over the years on many networks and have learned that some phones and some networks are terrible with time.
Yes, that's what I tell the boss when I oversleep.
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> Yes, that's what I tell the boss when I oversleep
My boss knows I never rely on my phone lol. I have a proper alarm clock.
I have to blame traffic :D
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I feel it should be a crime to release any electronic device with a clock in it that doesn't do this. Admittedly that's a bit nuclear, but given the number of times I have to keep resetting my cooker and microwave clocks I feel it's justified. Long sentence, custodial only please.
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Well we had synchronous electric clocks that relied on the AC mains power for a long time...unless you lived in an areas with regular 'brownouts' they work pretty well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Smiths in the UK made loads of those. You sometimes see them in antique shops although you tend to find their mechanical movements more commonly.
Plus their non-quartz battery clocks.
I'd never heard of a mains clock till I was an adult. I'm of the quartz generation being born in 1980
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My DAB radios/TV's are pretty good at setting themselves from the accurate time signal embedded in the transmission. Its only the audible "pips" from BBC R4 that would be delayed as it is compressed audio.
Only one DAB radio I have is annoying, in that it will sync to the embedded time, but ONLY if you tell it to. If the battery dies it will happily sit there at 12:00 am all day.
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> When we can get 4G voice call latency down below 100ms,
DAB, Freeview etc are lightspeed vs streaming apps dont forget I mentioned that the app for that radio station was several mins behind!
The voice latency for 4G might be good, but not good enough for accurate time as 100ms is way too slow, but coverage is terrible! That applies to DAB slightly as well, much less so for 4G and FM and AM practically have no problem with coverage barring the odd annoying hill.
> And we haven't even considered how sl
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DAB, Freeview etc are lightspeed vs streaming apps dont forget I mentioned that the app for that radio station was several mins behind!
The voice latency for 4G might be good, but not good enough for accurate time as 100ms is way too slow, but coverage is terrible! That applies to DAB slightly as well, much less so for 4G and FM and AM practically have no problem with coverage barring the odd annoying hill.
Nobody is going to use the civilian radio / TV broadcast for computer clock synchronization, at least not in today's world for sub-second accuracy. We have GPS and NTP internet server for that.
What one would reasonably hope for is getting all these radio and TV be reasonably in sync when doing live event broadcast, i.e. not perceiving delay more than a split second. Hearing people hurraying a goal when what's on your screen is still totally lagging behind the event not seeing it yet is silly.
I am okay
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no need to wear out my phones power/home button to check the time.
Two questions. What cheap phone are you using which has button that wear out. And what cheap phone are you using that requires you to turn it on to see the clock? It just clocked over 20:15. No I didn't touch my phone, but I can see it. It shows the time on the "off" display.
They totally fail to set the time and either need you to manually set it
Modern phones do not ask you to set the time manually. If you disable network time they just get GPS time and use your last selected timezone (which you can change manually). Seriously I have *NEVER* in my entire life seen anyone set a
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> Two questions. What cheap phone are you using which has button that wear out.
Samsung J6, a few months ago it was a J5 but I upgraded to the J6 as the J5 was annoying with only having a small amount of main storage. It made updates a pain as to update it had to move the app back off the SD card leaving me to manually transfer it back!
You are probably wondering why I'm on an old cheap J6? Well its a effing phone mate. It makes calls, takes a photo, sends a text. It's going to last me years yet and sh
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I suggest https://www.time.gov/ [time.gov] as a reliable source. NIST takes it seriously, and loading it directly means you don't have to wonder if something in your source chain has lost sync.
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I wouldn't use that myself, that's in the US which adds delays due to the distance involved. I'm not near close enough.
Better to use the NPL which provides the UK time reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There are lots of time sources now (Score:2)
GPS receivers are cheap; you can get a usb one for like $20. So if you want to keep your network isolated sensor and logging device clock accurate - this is a easy option.
For at least ATSC (I assume the global equivalents as well) the PSIP data contains a system time table that again in the USA/CAN contains GPS time, and is sent I think at least once every sixty seconds.
There are other sources too I am sure. In any event even if you don't have an speedy reliable internet connection to reach an NTP server,
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Fun fact, getting the time VIA GPS means you are a Stratum 1 time source, assuming you have an accurate local clock.
At Least We Still Have the Numbers Stations (Score:2)
Does anybody really know ... (Score:2)
Does anybody really care?
Not that big a deal, it's either... (Score:2)
In Soviet Russia,,, (Score:2)
Time signals you!
You can still hear the signal... (Score:1)
just call: 613-745-1576
Did they broadcast the beeps (Score:2)
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