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Comment by trebligdivad | Hacker News Reader

'ZCZC' and 'NNNN' - all caps? Is this still set up for teletypes?! Please tell me there's not somewhere still getting these via baudot?!

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ZCZC appears to be a signaling codeword for this protocol:

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

- "NAVTEX messages are transmitted using binary frequency-shift keying (BFSK) at 100 bit/s and a 170 Hz frequency shift"

It's a low-bandwidth way to send weather tweets to seafaring boats.

I love your phrase 'weather tweets'

ZCZC is the Start of Message signal for a few protocols, including NOAA's SAME, which seems relevant here as this is a NOAA broadcast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_Area_Message_Encoding

Why not? Japan was using floppy disks until last week or so :D

Also, it's not like someone is going to be requesting to add emojis to these reports.

It's clean, human-readable, it looks like it should not be difficult to parse if the case needed... so why change it?

Because that's how the younger employees feel like they can contribute by rewriting everything. Clearly, anything created by theOlds can be improved upon using modern but of course they'll make it emoji friendly because that's how you know it's modern.

Floppy disks? Nah that was ages ago. We've upgraded to fax machines.

Wait till you see how messages are transmitted at DND…

Dungeons and Dragons?

Department of national defence maybe

Or weather reports for aviation[1]…

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METAR

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