92 points by da768 5 hours ago
I sent a letter to my MP the day after receiving the administrative alert on my radio last week, explaining how weather radio has directly led to me avoiding significant property damage in the past couple years. Doesn't feel like there's a whole lot else I can do.
Guess I'll sell my weather radio on eBay in a few weeks, since there won't be any market for it locally.
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.
Here's a map I put together of the Weatheradio (one "r"!) service coverage in Canada, assuming each station has a range of 60 km: https://www.keacher.com/files/dir12/weatheradio_map2.png Perhaps unsurprisingly, the coverage is most dense where the population density is also highest, with some exceptions.
And if anybody is curious, here's the coverage for the equivalent Weather Radio service in the United States: https://www.weather.gov/nwr/maps
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 bandwidth, it feels like an appropriate use for GEO satellites broadcasting down over a large area in the clear, such that any basic SDR and a cheap dish could grab the signal with minimal fuss.
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.
We probably shouldn't deprecate AM for emergency broadcasts given you can listen to AM radio with grass https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9UO9tn4MpI
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 was the middle of the night, there were few people at local radio stations, all operated by Clear Channel with mostly automated programming. No formal emergency warnings were issued for several hours while Minot officials located station managers at home. North Dakota's public radio network, Prairie Public Broadcasting, was notified and did broadcast warnings to citizens.
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 and less responsive! EAS never has to "Interrupt This Program" it can just get to the meat.
> 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.
Replacing a system that works with no internet, no power grid, and no account with "just use your phone" is not an upgrade.
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.
Based on my own lived bias and HN addiction... The leading demographic has to be West Coast of the USA, then the multinational PNW as the most active HN users.
Again, I am biased, but as far as HN bias goes, that ain't bad. These are amazing places chock-full of the coolest people.
After decades of the West Coast life I now live in rest of world, and wish that rest of world could be so lucky.
Canadian checking in!
Canadian here. AM almost A.
I think the HN population is more distributed geographically then you'd initially think
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 always functionally ignorant about the collateral costs of arbitrary technology policy changes. Evey village usually has at least one idiot. =3
> 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.
Pretty boneheaded move. Yeah I'll download your app (???) so I can listen to critical weather information on my phone that can't even stay powered on an entire day without charging... Cool, guess I'll just take a wild guess as to how this extreme weather is going to proceed. The whole point of these services is their resilience and the fact you can depend on them. Some fragile-ass mobile phone shit is not a suitable replacement for that whatsoever. Totally inexcusable.
If this is a money issue can someone else take over? I mean can they raise money for it. I'm not Canadaian but I'll donate.
I'd be willing to bet that Canada takes in more than enough tax payer dollars to cover the expense of this critical service. I'd even be willing to bet that there's more than enough tax payer money just in waste and fraud to cover the expense if somebody cared to dig into the finances and government contracts to track it down. The idea of cutting this service as a cost savings measure is laughable.
One less thing to listen to on my radio scanner :(
I hate to see this. I bought a Sangean AM/FM/Weather radio with NOAA All Hazards alerting a little while back (I've been extremely happy with it) and as I was programming it wondered how long until either a group like DOGE, or private interest who wanted to repurpose these radio bands would cause such a wonderful service to go away. Maybe I'm naive but I'm surprised it happened in Canada before it happened here in the U.S.
They already went at NOAA with cuts and firings. If there's no national weather service there'll be nothing to broadcast (and less data on climate change)
Yeah, super disappointing. Not only do many of my amateur radio transceivers tune to the weather FM frequencies, I just picked up a cheap low-power receiver for the purpose of having something that can last a long time during extended power outages, if necessary -- with the idea of being able to keep up with local radio and weather radio during those times. I assumed Canada of all places will keep these kind of services going indefinitely, because they are pretty important when all else fails.
So I'm guessing that this is what those stylish wood grain Weatheradio cubes in the Radio Shack catalog were for?
While I understand the nostalgia, as a Canadian I wasn't even aware this was a thing.
We still have CBC radio that broadcast weather reports, and whether reports are still available on the internet.
If I understand correctly, this service was for people who didn't have internet access, which with cell service, StarLink (yeah, Elon Musk, I know but it has been a game charger in remote communities) and similar services is become a very small minority of individuals.
I think we have to not maintain things that are older tech and unused and focus on things that are the future. If we didn't, we'd still have roads maintained for horse and buggies.
> We still have CBC radio that broadcast weather reports, and whether reports are still available on the internet.
Commercial radio/television broadcasts are not the same thing since they do not offer continuous weather broadcasts. Getting weather information from the Internet is better in most respects, but it is not always the best medium to receive such information. I am a regular user of the Weatheradio service during the summer months, and have been through one situation where it most likely saved lives.
> I think we have to not maintain things that are older tech and unused and focus on things that are the future.
The problem is that we are ditching older tech without finding a viable replacement. I find it difficult to associate that approach with focusing on the future. I find it easier to associate it with forgetting lessons we learned the hard way.
[delayed]
> people who didn't have internet access, which with cell service, StarLink (yeah, Elon Musk, I know but it has been a game charger in remote communities) and similar services
I'm not bringing Starlink on a week-long kayak voyage. My cousin isn't bringing it on his hiking and hunting trip in the bush. There's no cell service out there - radio is all you get, at best. This might not be tremendously well used, but there was and continues to be utility for radio broadcasting that one can receive on a cheap low-powered device for free with no subscription in the middle of nowhere. None of your suggestions touch that.
> we'd still have roads maintained for horse and buggies.
Do you leave the city, much? Ever drive up an FSR?
For people who live in remote areas, Starlink has been very helpful. Hiking and outdoor activities, much less so.
For what it's worth, we're probably a few years off from ubiquitous availability of cheap, sat-based cellphone data. In fact, my iPhone has free sat-based texting right now.
Although also, I really don't enjoy that crucial safety services such as weather data are being discontinued. And I actually really don't enjoy the premise that I'll be able to be reached anywhere in the world, even the remote wilderness.
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 plans, or if a giant storm is due later in the day, that kind of thing. Once you've been out for a day or two, all the forecasts you had ahead of time are obsolete and incorrect, particularly in the mountains.
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.
> If I understand correctly, this service was for people who didn't have internet access, which with cell service, StarLink and similar services is become a very small minority of individuals.
You'd be surprised at how bad cell service is in Canadian areas that aren't even considered "boonies". There are often times when you're driving without cell service or any other options.
I agree with that. Cell service in Canada is centred around cities and non-minor roads with most every that isn't in those categories it gets spotty pretty quickly and the non-existent.
Why was this done?
The current govt is on a bit of an austerity kick at the moment, particularly wrt staffing of public bodies. Would be surprised if this simply wasn't a casualty of that.
I don't think it's 100% accurate to call the budget "austerity".
The budget projects increases in both revenue and spending, and increases the deficit by ~50% percent.
What the government has asked for is widespread cuts across the board from current programs and operations (and staffing) to try to make more room for new spending in new areas. They are targeting getting to ~$13 billion CAD reduction in annual operations cost by end of decade.
By contrast, there are a lot of major spending programs - ~$10 billion CAD added to the defense budget, ~$5 billion CAD in tariff relief.
The current govt is planning for us to spend $78B more than we take in, about $2,000 per person. That seems pretty far from austerity.
First guess is that it's due to the federal government cutting some stuff... and things like this are usually the first to go.
Things like this are usually the last things to go which is how the system has survived so long. It's a brain dead move to endanger public health and safety to save pennies by killing off simple and reliable infrastructure. Especially when disasters are only expected to get worse and more frequent.
Sad to see things like this close, the US had a some similar stations that have closed over the years. I think these stations are still useful in this day and age.
The costs of these stations were probably like change one find in their sofa. But in the US, there is always enough funds for killing people, little for keeping people alive and safe. The same may be starting to happen in Canada too, they probably need to start increasing they defense spending due to changing winds from the south.
I'd noticed something was going on lately. I sent an email over two months ago to Environment Canada about a station near Brockville (VFK721) repeating its intro statement over and over again without a forecast and never got a reply from them. The station's still broken.
I guess the stations are just stuck right now live transmitting possibly not even a forecast, just an endless station ID announcement.
Only boaters use this.
