Canada ends official time signal | Hacker News Reader

Canada ends official time signal

hackaday.com

152 pointsreaperducer74 comments

Not entirely abruptly. The downfall was seen back in 2018. I, like most listeners, simply didn't believe the transmission would end. Like a warm security blanket the signal has been a presence in my life since my earliest days.

"NRC ... spokesperson Orian Labrèche said CBC installed HD radio transmitters in 2018, which caused a delay of up to nine seconds in broadcasting the time signal. The council proposed several solutions and worked with CBC to solve the delay, but "ultimately, CBC/Radio-Canada made the decision to stop broadcasting the NRC's official time signal"

I am sad that the actual ending came with a whimper rather than a full-on cross-nation bang. A party to rival that of the final Tragically Hip concert. It certainly should have been handled better. A nation-wide listening party would have been monumental.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/cbc-stops-broadcasting...

Sigh. But HD radio is crap! That's the worst reason ever to stop doing something lmao.

A 9 second delay for a radio channel? So they can't do some interactive things like phone calls without a 9s delay anymore either?

It really seems modern tech doesn't care about delay at all, while personally I do care about it. Modern tech should be better, but on the delay it's getting worse instead. Bluetooth audio is another example, with top tier headphones no longer supporting lower latency bluetooth codecs like aptx, and GPU's being ok adding delay to insert some "AI" frames, and delay between moving a camara and seeing the updated image on screen. Plus this love that designers have for "long-press" on/off buttons rather than immediate clicky ones.

I often wonder what chromecast is doing in the 10 seconds it takes to start streaming something. Especially on hardware and software developed by google.

Buffering and waiting for TCP slow-start to get up to speed. While the amount of buffer time needed can be debated, given that in a long stream it is likely that a packet will be lost and resent via normal TCP (or just sent via a different route and so arrive late), you should have a few seconds buffer, and that means a few seconds at the start before the stream starts. It is a technical thing.

You don't have to implement things as above. For live video you probably should use UDP and design your protocol so that you can handle a few missed packets - that is have your video become fuzzy in those cases. This is a lot more complex to design though and so not would you should do first. Even if you have Google's engineers, the first solution is better for not-live video since a few more seconds of delay mean you can keep clear video.

When you phone in, they tell you to turn the radio off and the radio plays through the telephone. Otherwise you would get feedback.

I still have a delay using Bluetooth between phone and car. Video/audio out of sync.

I have a cheap $20 Bluetooth dongle off Amazon that hooks into the audio port and cigarette lighter for power and it isn’t out of sync.

In the US, many “live” call ins are actually recorded off air (like during commercial breaks) and then played back later.

This gives time to censor, edit or cancel the caller completely. They can also tell the caller to turn off the radio to eliminate noise on the call, but can still hear themselves come on after the call is over.

the talk radio I'm aware of generally runs on a 10 second delay - short enough to be considered live, but still enough delay that if someone swears (illegal in the US) they can hit the beep button afterwards and overwrite the bad words. I've heard someone call in the next room and that is how it was, plus at various times the host has talked about this.

Things like sports games are generally fully live, but they don't have call in portions and a trained host can be trusted to use clean language.

> swears (illegal in the US)

What's actually keeping that beeping thing still alive in the US? Just inertia of the existing law with no reason to perform the work needed to remove it, or are there people who genuinely feel actual emotional pain upon hearing such language in the US and they are the majority voters?

Many like to listen to the radio (etc.) with children present. Many would prefer their children not be exposed to cursing on a regular basis.

I think this is the biggest one, particularly if you're listening in the car and just scanning up and down the dial— it's easy to stumble across whatever station and not really be aware what it is or who is talking.

If there was a way to send "ratings" metadata then that would change a lot, as you could trivially configure your car radio to just skip those channels (same as how the playstation profile my kids use unsupervised hides M-rated titles).

> If there was a way to send "ratings" metadata then that would change a lot, as you could trivially configure your car radio to just skip those channels.

I image that it should be possible. Many channels already send song information, perhaps that same functionality could be used.

But there's no such law in European countries, yet radio/TV is not a continuous swear-fest. Bleeps don't exist (except when on purpose making it look like the US, or imported). I'm sure there are some guidelines here too, but the US system just gives such condescending impression and the bleep, if anything, draws more rather than less attention to it

One of the biggest ironies is how puritanical we Americans are regarding swearing and the naked body, but extreme violence such as showing people brutally murdered, that's fine.

Yes, the religious voting bloc that still cares about such things for some reason is very powerful.

I recently switched from smart lights that used a cloud service to local ZigBee lights controlled via Home Assistant. One of the first things I noticed was just how snappy they are. You tap the button and they immediately turn off, almost like you're just killing the power with a physical switch. Plus they're more secure & private to boot!

That's one of the things that immediately turned me off much "smart" home things. Not only is a round trip to a server completely unnecessary, it makes the functionality significantly worse (to say nothing of security/privacy).

    So they can't do some interactive things like phone 
    calls without a 9s delay anymore either?

These were almost never truly live. They have to build in a delay in case you start spewing obscenities or something. There were are also various latencies involved anyway. That's why they always tell you to shut the radio off when you're on the air.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/290129-REG/Eventide_B...

But at any rate, this has zero effect on live call-ins.

I'll be that person. There are no top-tier bluetooth headphones, only mid-tier at best, and they're grossly inferior to wired mid-tier headphones in terms of acoustics. (Which is obvious, when you spend 80% of the budget on processors, batteries and electronics, that you're spending less on audio hardware at the same price point).

With such disposable mediocre technology replacing such a superior predecessor, I really do think I get what I deserve when I buy them.

Delay is something I imagine isn't regulated by much. For example, in the US all cars have to have reverse facing cameras so when you put the car in reverse, you can see if you are about to back over someone.

If I turn my Jeep on, it has such underpowered infotainment hardware that I can easily shift to reverse, disengage the parking brake, back down my driveway, shift into drive and start cruising down the street before it FINALLY turns on the reverse camera, which then displays me driving forward. That's also if the Accept button lets you press it, which it ignores a lot.

At what point should regulated functionality ALSO have some level of regulated performance?

Even without HD Radio transmitters, the signal to repeaters is sent via geostationary satellite which has an inherent delay.

I’ve observed the time signal being off by several seconds even before the 2018 transition.

That delay is mostly predictable and so you can account for it. You still will be off by a few (I'm not sure what unit, but fraction of a second) as the speed of light in the atmosphere is not a constant. You can figure out the current speed of light in the atmosphere, as well but that requires a lot of complex hardware.

It's worth noting that this is not talking about CHU[1], which is what I would first think of as the "Canada Time Signal".

It's talking about the Canadian equivalent of "the pips", the UK version of which is called the Greenwich Time Signal[2], broadcast over normal broadcast radio stations.

CHU is still broadcasting. (And the UK still broadcasts "the pips".)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHU_(radio_station)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Time_Signal

Oh, OK. CHU is the real time station, like WWV/WWVH.

Here's a recording of CHU, still on the air.[1] For comparison, WWV [2] and WWVH.[3]. This is what people used for time sync before GPS. Any shortwave radio can receive these, and with enough antenna, they can be received almost anywhere on the planet. They are also frequency standards, with their carrier frequencies regulated by the atomic clocks.

Sending time signals over digital audio channels with seconds of buffering is wrong enough that it's probably better to discontinue it. That's less accurate than most modern watches and worse than cell phone time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVAad9e2v2U

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMCI9I6xn6A

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW4VazIStq4

TIL about "The Pips". WTIC-AM in Hartford, CT, on 1080 MHz, broadcasts a Morse letter V (dit-dit-dit-dah) every hour, such that the "dah" starts on the hour; the tones occur in two different frequencies that make it sound like the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth.

> WTIC-AM in Hartford, CT, on 1080 MHz

1080 KHz you mean… 1.080 ghz is in the range used for aeronautical navigation.

Yes, I meant kHz. D'oh.

Interestingly if you needed an antenna for 1080 MHz but ordered one for 1080 kHz it'd probably show up on the back of a tractor trailer rig with a crane to offload it.

Canada maintains public NTP time servers.

time.nrc.ca

time.chu.nrc.ca

There’s just no reason for this tone anymore when you literally trip over more accurately NTP synced devices in Canada which you can sync against at any time of day, or use devices which sync against an NTP server directly.

This remind me of when the BBC had to remove the clock from their Internet homepage. This was because it just used the local time on the user's machine, and so was considered to be inaccurate (and people would assume the BBC were authoritative!)

What surprised me looking up the story is that it happened surprisingly recently in 2013. I would have assumed that by that time the average person were sufficiently internet savvy to recognize that the clock was not remotely generated somehow. I wonder if the same conclusion would be reached today, or if BBC developers would instead sync the time between the server and website.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/bbc-forced-t...

I don't see how the average person could know it didn't came from the servers. Even for a developer it would require looking at the JS code or the network calls.

Anyway, what's the point of embedding a clock in a website? Everyone has a clock on their desktop computer to start with.

> I would have assumed that by that time the average person were sufficiently internet savvy to recognize that the clock was not remotely generated somehow.

IME the average person really has no intuition for how the internet and websites work. I don't think the thought process goes much beyond "BBC is showing me the time" -> "obviously they are showing me the correct time according to the BBC."

Nice to hear about something done by the government that isn't controversial. Just plain old boring decisions and doing stuff.

It’s mildly controversial…

People had a lot of love for the time signal!

I used to use it to set my clocks but now I just set them based on when the music starts for the hourly news. Close enough.

For what it's worth, there is still an official talking clock phone number one can call to get the time. I don't know how much latency POTS and cell phone service have, but it's something.

https://nrc.canada.ca/en/certifications-evaluations-standard...

Fine over landline; but inconsistent on cellphones. :-P

Before the CBC went digital, they had dedicated landlines to the NRC time signal lab.

I just tested it against https://time.is on my cell phone (using wifi calling because network strength is abysmal where I live).

I don't have a precise measurement but it was imperceptibly close, within 100ms probably. Certainly close enough to set a clock for non critical purposes.

There is more and more VoIP within the PSTN so landlines aren't "safe" either if you need millisecond accuracy.

Worth noting that every satellite and almost every cell tower broadcasts time at a much faster interval, not to mention NTP as the article states.

Polish radio (Program 1) brodacasted (and maybe still does) a time signal at 12:00 every day. It's a series of beeps and the end of the last and the longest beep marks 12:00. Here's how it sounds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p34LVMQI19M&t=129s

Fun fact, in the past (I suppose it's obsolete by now, since time and distance are defined in terms of the speed of light now) the carrier of the Program 1 (225kHz - as visible on the video) was an official standard of frequency in Poland.

I have happy memories of Dad driving me home from Hebrew school Sundays and hearing those beeps on CBC radio...then the pregnant pause, then the longer beep and the news. Definitely a weekly ritual.

Canadian news article about this shared earlier in the week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37834639

That Canadian news article clarifies that only a very specific once-a-day audio announcement on the CBC's main national radio network is being ended while the National Research Council will continue providing several other types of time signal as usual. The Hackaday article's title it very poorly worded.

maybe they're trying to tell their submarine fleet something

https://www.businessinsider.com/bbc-radio-show-may-be-preven...

> During their isolated missions, crews watch for signals that the UK still exists — and may launch a counter-attack if they believe their country has been destroyed. One of these signs is whether BBC Radio 4 is still broadcasting the "Today" programme, Britain's flagship news and politics show.

Wow, that is eerily reminiscent of the deterrence in Liu Cixin's _Three Body Problem_ novels.

A lot of the thinking in there is intellectually downstream of ideas invented by Cold War nuclear geostrategists, so that’s not too surprising. The desire to not get blown up drove some people to think deeply about how to deal with foreign civilizations that think differently from you, have conflicting interests, but also don’t want to get blown up.

Part of the reasoning for that signal in particular is its low frequency: 198khz, so one of the best commercial signals under their control that might penetrate through a bit of water at least.

Not generally known, but Radio 4 on LW is a highly stable frequency reference and also [0] carries a digital time signal (along with other broadcast data, like signals for electricity meters). It's done by phase-modulating the carrier and is pretty easy to extract using analogue techniques or simple SDR (e.g. downmix to audio and extract the phase using a soundcard).

Having said all that, looks like it's being turned off next year [1]. Let's hope someone tells the sub commanders!

[0] I presume it still does, been a while since I checked.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/articles/2023/bbc-radio-4-...

Canada's largest sub is in a mall

> Canada's largest sub is in a mall

Your joke comment is a quarter century out of date

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_ships_of_the_R...

https://www.nsnews.com/local-news/north-van-firm-scraps-west...

I just realized that the main state radio station in Portugal also has a series of beeps a couple times a day. It never occurred to me that this could have a practical function.

I don't know if or when it stopped, but here, every hourly radio news bulletin would start with a distinct two short, one long beep pattern, the short ones being a countdown, the long one being "it is now exactly the whole hour".

I'm sure some radios could listen to that signal too, so not just for manual adjustment.

I wonder how far into Canada they can hear WWV / WWVB[0]

[0] https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-di...

Varies, generally difficult for me in SW Ontario though with some occasional impressive 25MHz propagation with RS59 subject to heavy QSB. But I cannot rely on it for setting a clock...

Hmmm... I would have thought the WWV 10 MHz signal would be pretty good in Ontario much of the time. It's only 10KW AM, but still, from Colorado to Ontario 10 MHz is a pretty usable frequency. WWVH, now that would be hit-or-miss. What do you have for an antenna?

It's sad when any sort of ritual comes to an end, but I mean... with cell phones sync'd to the tower's time, and temp controlled time crystals (like in the apple watch), are we technically missing anything without this?

continuity.

It's an utterly futile anachronism. But it will still be dearly missed.

Given that the CBC had dedicated landlines to the NRC time labs, the obviously solution would have been to get the NRC to send a pips signal for 12:59:51 (9 seconds earlier).

The article says the delay is "up to" nine seconds, a wording which sounds to me like it's not a fixed delay.

The delay is probably between 0 and 9 seconds, and probably differs between people who are listening at the same time. It does not seem like there is an obvious solution to this.

> with cell phones sync'd to the tower's time, and temp controlled time crystals (like in the apple watch)

The best we have is actually GPS time, accurate to ~100ns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Accu...).

I'm wondering if weather patterns can drop that accuracy back to mere microseconds. Just in case, you can rely on wired terrestrial signals for similar precision:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Time_Protocol

Sure, but my point is that basically everyone has at least a basic cell phone (and I assume the cell towers are using GPS to sync their time).

> are we technically missing anything without this

The title is utterly misleading because the official time signal is CHU and that is still alive and well. That signal is important to all sorts of things, this one was not. (Small note: perhaps an international agreement to keep WWV / WWVB / WWVH alive would serve us better.)

What if you don't have a cell phone? Boom, checkmate.

I'm half joking, there's a percentage of people that doesn't have a smartphone, anything internet connected, who just have analog clocks or watches and who (I presume) would or could use this signal to sync things.

This is my grandfather in northern ontario. Has TV & landline, but no cell phone, no computer, no internet. No interest to start at 80

Where I live, in Mexico, cell tower time is useless. I sync my phone manually to my laptop every few days. I wish I had some way to sync the phone to GPS automatically. There is probably an app for that.

> Although perhaps obsolete by today’s standards, this 15 to 60 second long broadcast at 13:00 Eastern Time every single day has been a constant in the life of Canadians

I have never once heard this.

Yes, there are many Canadians who will never listen to CBC radio, nevermind at 1300 EDT. There are also many Canadians who listen to CBC radio while working or driving

The question now becomes, how much will they be auctioning off that licensed frequency spectrum for and who will it benefit?

The radio station is still broadcasting, but no longer signals the top of the hour once per day.

End of Watch

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