As Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government has been tightening its belt on the public purse (while simultaneously making huge promises that push the country’s budget back in the red), various federal departments have been looking at things they can cut to save money. The most obvious targets for such cuts are things that (a) cost a non-trivial amount of money, (b) use old technology and are hard to maintain, (c) have cheaper alternatives, (d) are not used by a public that isn’t even aware of its existence, and (e) don’t employ a large number of people.
So it probably shouldn’t be surprising that this year is seeing the end of two government-run radio services that you probably didn’t know existed.
Weatherradio
On March 31, Environment and Climate Change and other buzzwords Canada’s Weatherradio service shut down for good. The network of more than 200 transmitters across the country broadcast automatically-generated English and French audio weather reports on VHF frequencies (162.55 MHz in Montreal) that could be received by anyone with a receiver tuned to those frequencies (which, in practice, meant amateur radio operators and people who had AM/FM radios that offered a “weather” option).
Besides some radio and weather enthusiasts, there was little reaction to the decision to shut down the service.
The government argues that other, more widely adopted technologies make Weatherradio obsolete. Most communities within the reception areas of these stations can access the internet on their phones and use the WeatherCan mobile app to get their forecasts. Emergency weather information can be transmitted through wireless public alerting and through emergency alerts on AM and FM radio stations, that people are more likely to be listening to anyway. And sailors will still have access to the marine VHF channels run by the Coast Guard.
Opponents to the shutdown talk about how unreliable the cell network is, particularly in more remote communities, and particularly in a weather emergency that might, say, knock out power to cell towers. While it’s a good point, it’s hard to make a case that an automated system that few people have the technology to receive would be better than (or must be paired with) a system that uses AM and FM radio stations, cellphone towers, TV stations and TV providers to all simultaneously broadcast emergency messages when ordered by the government to do so.
CHU
The other radio service being shut down is Canada’s shortwave time signal station, which operates under the callsign CHU.
The station, which broadcasts from Ottawa on 3.33 MHz, 7.85 MHz and 14.67 MHz, gives you the current time, and emits a tone every minute on the minute so you can synchronize your clock to it.
CBC radio listeners may remember when the stations emitted a tone at 1pm so people could synchronize their clocks (until they stopped doing it in 2023 in part because many people listen to the radio in ways that make it inaccurate). This is a similar service.
Run by the National Research Council, the broadcasts were ultra-precise, boasting an accuracy of under a millisecond based on atomic clocks.
But most people don’t set their clocks by radio these days. Computers and other internet-connected devices use the Network Time Protocol, and NRC is keeping its NTP servers going. Mostly, the time signal is used to test shortwave radios, or as a curiosity for someone who hasn’t heard it before.
And, though “don’t rely on the U.S.” has been a slogan of late, people who want to listen to a time station will tend to tune in to the broadcasts from WWV (Colorado) and WWVH (Hawaii) on the sexier and easier to remember frequencies of 2.500, 5.000, 10.000, 15.000, 20.000 and 25.000 MHz.
The news of CHU’s shutdown, set for June 22, has generated even less buzz, with a few hobbyists lamenting its nearly 100-year-old history but not much else.
I’ve listened to both CHU and Weatherradio over the years, and I will miss them. But if that’s the price to pay to finally get high-speed rail between Montreal and Toronto (it will, of course, actually cost way more than the price of these services), then I’ve reached the stage of acceptance that this era of automated radio is behind us.
Goodbye, soulless number-reading machines.
As a former contributor to the Montreal Mirror and the Hour, and now a not-quite starving artist/writer, I appreciate your thoughts. Newswriting is tough!
“CHU, Dominion Observatory Canada”…wnet tot automated message when I was a child listening to it! Another era gone.
I really like that you publish news of what is more often under the radar!
The Government should consider closing down . From a policy perspective, it contributed to the decline of our telecom and technology development. It was totally incapable of developing a robust plan for the development of telecom and broadcasting in Canada. After decades, it has failed to ensure the delivery of high-speed (1GIG) internet services to every home in CDN. Its technical licensing could easily be outsourced to the FCC.
We should not forget the CRTC. In the broadcasting arena, it has protected incumbents from the evils of competition. For decades, the CRTC has developed anti-competitive rules that protect the mainstream media, CBC, CTV, and Global. It overtly seeks to prevent the emergence of innovative alternatives to the mainstream media. It has encouraged the Government of Canada to provide these organizations with handouts that encourage poor performance. The taxation of major USA providers as a source of cash to distribute to poorly performing CBC, CTV and Global, as well as their journalism program. The largest of the CRTC extends to some hundreds of largely underperforming Community and Campus Radio stations.
In sum, the Government of Canada should reduce, if not close, Industry Canada’s Department of Telecommunications.
The Department of Communications is a blob that no longer has a raison d’etre. The CRTC, I believe, would receive little support from the Canadian public. While it is at work, the Government of Canada should export to the Quebec Government Radio Canada. It would enhance the Government of Quebec’s control over the culture that it wishes to protect. Do we need to say more? My sense is that most CDNs would agree with me. CRTC and Industry Canada need to go, and Radio Canada needs to be in the hands of Quebecers.
I never used the WeatherRadio service in Canada. I didn’t even know that that there was a transmitter serving the Montreal area. But, I live in a metro area with almost 3 million people. I have access to this sort of info all over the place. But, in a country the size of Canada, that’s not always the case. Radio signals can be a life line to some people. That’s something our political class in this country don’t understand. Maybe they even don’t want to understand. Nor do they understand technology. They use a smart phone so thats the only understanding they have of the available technology.
They mentioned that there are alternative ways to get this information, but as you mentioned, not always reliable, nor available. One of the ways they didn’t consider is the use of HD Radio. The WeatherRadio service can be placed on a HD Radio sub-channel on the FM band. This can easily be done by placing it on a CBC or SRC Radio station using HD Radio. Now, the number CBC/SRC stations using HD Radio are not much. But, they do cover major markets and their surrounding areas. Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Hamilton, Vancouver. Yes, no station in Winnipeg, Halifax, nor Calgary, but there are other stations in those markets using HD Radio, and they could be approach about renting out a HD sub-channel for a period of time. Until a local CBC or SRC station added HD Radio. The service could continue. Okay, Not 200 transmitters, but better than zero. Currently there are 56 to 58 Radio stations in Canada operating a HD Radio signal.
You can see the list of current radio stations running HD Radio in Canada here.
https://hddirectory.neocities.org/
Now the argument will be that people will need to upgrade their radios from AM/FM analog to AM/FM/HD Radio. But, you would still need to have a speciality AM radio to access the WeatherRadio frequencies anyway.
My point is that by shutting it down, it’ll be gone. If they transitioned to using HD Radio, the service would still be available, and able to expand as more stations added HD Radio.
Now its gone, and probably never coming back.
Most FM radio stations are using the HD Radio MP3 framework. This has two sectors. The 2nd sector has a small 24 kbps of space. This is a perfect place to put the WeatherRadio service. In Montreal, CBF-FM 95.1 could place this service as a HD3. And you only need one station per market to do that. The service as I understand was bi-lingual.
https://hdradio.com/broadcasters/engineering-support/multicasting/
I consulted the weather station on my emergency radio every day. And I am a city-dweller. It was way less annoying than listening to CBC radio or watching the Météo Média Roku app with their videos of extreme weather and cute animals. So yes, I actually preferred the “soulless number-reading machine.”
That said, the government of Canada has been erasing its shortwave services since 2012 when it cancelled the Radio Canada International shortwave service to save money… the money saved was likely used to pay for the wonderfully useless Phoenix payment system which eventually cost billions of dollars. But I’m just speculating. Will the money saved by cancelling these “outdated” services go to another potential money pit like a wonderfully useless Euro-style speedy rail service? I think you are right to speculate, Mr Fagstein. You can take that train if you like (if it ever gets built) , but I still prefer old highway 7 when I visit Hogtown.
The shutdown of low-cost things like CHU and Weatherradio and proclaiming the reason for doing so is “to save money” is pure hooey. Their cost was a small fraction of one percent of the federal budget. So small it’s irrelevant. It’s like the newly-minted city hall announcing 6 months ago that they’re axing the new baby boxes that were distributed via the libraries. Again, the cost of those was a tiny spit in the bucket compared to the full city budget with usual BS reason of cutting costs. The real reason is that they were an initiative of the previous administration and therefore had to go.
There is zero justification for a bullet train in the Quebec-Windsor corridor. The population quantity and density is nowhere close to enough to justify it. The reason VIA service is lousy is because they don’t have their own dedicated tracks. Put those tracks in and the problem is solved. No need to expropriate giant swaths of land for what will be another Mirabel airport (or worse, Pickering airport – the one that was never built.). If Carney & co. are serious about cost cutting they can start by not lighting $65B on fire to create a military-industrial complex only being asked for by elitists who think every decision made should be in service of capital.
Canada’s federal budget is huge. You can’t say costs are negligible because they don’t represent a significant part of the overall budget. By that logic nothing is ever a waste of money.
When it comes to CHU, honestly it has been out of date for 30 years or more. Between internet NTP time servers and GPS based time systems, there is about nothing that CHU does that anyone needs anymore. It is incredibly expensive to maintain 3 full transmitters on those frequencies running 24 hours per day.
Similarly, weather radio was a cool idea Awesome 1950s technology released in the 60s. It was sort of kind of useful but not really even, and since Canada didn’t go along with the US “all warnings” system and instead decided to use phone networks to spread things like Amber alerts, it is pretty much long past it’s stale date.
I am guessing there are probably hundreds if not thousands of other government programs out there that are the same, just kept there because they push “fund” every budget cycle without consideration.
I went camping in a ZEC recently way out of cell phone range. I thought I could use weatheradio to keep an eye on storms, etc. but it was gone. Only FM I could get was Radio-Canada, which seemed to never give a weather forecast. I honestly think they don’t do them anymore. Best I could do was listen to CFRX’s shortwave translator on 6070 for weather forecasts and add a day for. Well, that didn’t really work at all.