Weather Radio Listeners Newsletter for November 1st 2021
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Weatheradio_Canada.html 
Hello and welcome to the third and final issue of the newsletter for 2021. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the newsletter and what I’m going to do (over the next 12 months) is to go back and reflect on how the newsletter had started and has progressed to this day. I will insert some old articles and update some of them, as they are now out of date and in need of either an update, or expansion. I will also look back on how I would occasionally deviate from the main topic and talk about things which interest me, such as my favourite TV shows, comedians and groups. I will continue to do that and I have one coming up in this issue, because it’s the band in question’s 50th anniversary this year. I’ll give you a hint, in that they had a biopic in 2018, named after one of their signature songs. I have more coming up and of course, I will talk about why I like to do this, sometimes.

I will be looking back on the newsletter and how it has evolved, both with streamlining and expanding this periodical. I’ll get to that later on, but for now let’s look back on before the newsletter came to be and how it had started. I will also have some new material about i-Notify, as it has marched into Ontario and westward.

The following is how I got into Weather Radio and how the newsletter came to be. It all started way back in 1988, when I was 14 years old and living with my parents in Toronto Ontario, in the borough of East York. To give you an idea of where I was at back then, I was in grade 8 and plugging along, with my studies. I was also into music, as I still am and my favourite band back then was Def Leppard and they were riding high with their fourth and best selling album Hysteria. I still like Def Leppard, as well as the album Hysteria and their previous album Pyromania. I listened to mostly hard rock and heavy metal and those are my favourite genres of music, which I am happy to talk about with anyone who feels the same as me, about bands with loud guitars and either howling, or growling lead vocalists. After all, I do appreciate bands like Tool, Metallica and Slipknot as well.

When I first discovered Weatheradio Canada, I was serfing the TV channels, looking for something to watch. Note: blind people say “”watch” when referring to television, because it sounds better than saying that I listened to an episode of The Simpsons on TV. Sure, I hear the dialogue and music and may not know what’s going on on the screen, but I have an idea so I’m not totally left out. Anyway, I digress. I accidentally found a channel with continuous weather information and it seemed to be coming from the Toronto Weather Office. This was a few months prier to the launch of The Weather Network, formerly known back then as Weather Now on Cable TV.
I found out years later, what I had actually found was a channel which displayed a radar site just north of Toronto in a town called King city Ontario. That explains why the signal wasn’t consistent, with it being excellent on some days and on other days, fair to sometimes nearly unintelligible.I became a fan and learned that this was Weatheradio Canada Station XMJ225 in Toronto and it was actually broadcasting on a VHF frequency of 162.400 MHz. This was also before I knew what: VHF, HF or UHF even was. This was new for me and I had no idea that it would lead me to becoming a Ham Radio operator 21 years later.
I also realized that the voices I heard reading out weather information, were the same ones I heard on such radio stations as CJCL 1430 and CFRB. Remember in the last issue I had mentioned Environment Canada meteorologists on the radio, talking about the weather for the day and five days into the future? Back then, I had no WX radio and relied on listening to radio stations playing music which I didn’t like all that much. However, I did get to hear the weather forecasts delivered by the same people, who would also speak on Weatheradio Canada. Even in 1992, my favourite rock station in St Catharines had an Environment Canada meteorologist on the air, to talk about the lack of a summer that year, but that was rare. The world had gone through an El Niño the previous winter and it had continued, for a while longer. Of course, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo didn’t help either, as it had cooled down the worlds temperatures in 1991, thanks to a bunch of ash and rock spewing out of the volcano. For the record, it was Mike Palethorpe who had kindly spoken to 97.7 HTZFM back in 1992 and I hope I spelled his name correctly. Anyway, I digress once again.

In 1991, the channel I had monitored went off the air during that summer and I had no other way besides the telephone to get my weather. The other option was The Weather Network but it wasn’t what I wanted. Despite this I would sleep with it on because of the music that would play through the local forecasts, when people weren’t talking.
Fast faorward to 2000, I had discovered that a service called Talking Yello Pages had the weather from Environment Canada on it and I was hooked again. This time, I was determined to eventually get a Weather Radio of my own. I did on February 7th 2001. It was a piece of junk and it paled in comparison to my later receivers. It was an AM/ FM receiver with 3 WX channels. It also took 3 aaa batteries and there was no AC jack for power. To top it off, the reception of my own local WXR was worse than bad. In fact, it was atrocious and I had to put the radio in a certain place in my apartment and I had to extend the telescopic antenna all the way to hear it.
In 2002, I upgraded to a much better desktop model from Radio Shack. It had a tone alert feature and was much more reliable than the previous model. The only problem was that it was a desktop and not a portable unit. I would have liked to have bought something to take with me while traveling. That came in the form of the ESP2100 from Eton and it was my first SAME radio, before I knew what Specific Area Message Encoding even was. I had purchased it in 2004 and it was great, but there was still something lacking, such as the ability to get weather alerts on Weatheradio Canada. Even when SAME was introduced, I had no idea how it worked or even how the event and location codes worked.
In 2005, I had purchased my first crank radio from Eton, the FR300. That was fine but again, there was no AC power plug for it. All though, I finally purchased an adapter in 2008, which was suitable for this model.
In 2006, I had bought a handheld Marine transceiver from Cobra, the MRHH100VP and I was just happy with it. I was able to weather dx a bit but the only thing was that the audio was distorted but not so much that I couldn’t hear what was being said.
In 2007, I had finally purchased a SAME radio which actually had everything I wanted, which was the Oregon Scientific W-R108, now the W-R602. I loved it but it had a clock and calendar, which required site in order to be able to change said options. I also liked that it had a feature on it where I could set it to change channels on its own, when one channel became too week, while traveling.
My next model was the W-R300 from Midland and this was a perfect unit for me. It had a siren that went off when an alert was issued and it also had an AM/ FM radio which I could use. It also had a clock and calendar, but I could actually figure out how to set both of the settings to the correct time and date, because I was basically walked through each setting on the radio, as the manual did not do the settings in the order of how they would appear with the menu layout. This is still with me to this day.
Then, came the Midland HH54VP in 2010 and this is exactly what I needed out of a handheld WX radio. It had the siren that went off when a SAME alert is issued like the W-R300 and it also had the Home/ Travel feature of the W-R602. This is the model I take wen I go out of town on long trips and it has been reliable to this day.
Since 2008 I had also purchased a few handheld scanners which also have the Weather Radio on them. My 2 favourites are: BC246T and the BC346XT. I like them because I can not only use them as scanners but I can also use them as Weather Radios and they also have been a big help to me, when I needed them. I also purchased 2 more desktop WX radios to round out my collection. They are: Midland W-R120 and the Sangean CL-100. The latter is also a great AM and FM radio, with great sound and a very good FM receiver. I listen to my favourite rock station, which is in St Catharines Ontario and it comes in full quieting. Another WX radio I had purchased in August 2015 was the PRD9W, which is another portable unit, with an AM and FM receiver. It is equally as strong as the CL-100 and it is easy to use. The latest WX radio I had purchased is the Midland EH54 in January 2017 and I will never forget that day, or that weekend for that matter. I won’t get into why, except to say that my body didn’t take kindly to what I had eaten that day I had purchased the unit. Basically, I had gone through a period of food poisoning and combined that with pests in my apartment, made life rather difficult at the time. Basically, I am all up-to-date, with my radios and as far as any newer models, I don’t know if I will purchase anything else at the moment. After all, we are still in the midst of the pandemic and I’m not ready to order online, other than doing grocery shopping, along with items I can set up by myself and which do not require a manual. I also need to be able to operate the radio sufficiently. Need I say more?
Now to get to how the newsletter was born; In 2011 I started searching for some sort of newsletter that was all about Weather Radio but the only one I had found up to that point was the NOAA All Hazards Weather Radio Newsletter. I had enquired about it and I was told that there were no mailing lists for it. I had also offered my own idea’s and they were received warmly. I was also recommended to take what I had been thinking and put it into action, possibly creating my own newsletter.
That August I had sent out an email to friends of mine, who are in a Ham Radio group I was and still am in, pitching the idea of creating the newsletter. I had some responses but I also did some traveling north of Toronto to do some pitching and more people came forward and said they would like to join.
In November 2011 a friend of mine had put together a webpage for me, which is partly for my Ham radio interests but was also at the time, for the newsletter. Some of the issues are there but all of them are in order and not in attachments, for those who had received the PDF’s through the email list . This website has replaced the original from 2011 with all issues here since 2017. It took a few late nights and hurting my thumb, but it was worth it. Basically, I had to manually edit the text from the PDF of each issue and in some cases, some passages had some doubling of letters in the text, which had to be corrected. To make a long story short, everything was updated by March 22nd 2017 with all issues of the newsletter on the website and since then, I have published each issue as a blog post ever since. Then, in May 2018 the blog became the only place to get the newsletter and it has been this way, to the present day.

One thing you may know (if you have been with the newsletter for a long time) is that it has been composed on multiple devices, from computers to all manner of Smart phones. In fact, the first two issues were composed on an old Nokia 6682 Smart phone, which was much more primitive and didn’t have much latitude, when it comes to how I compose the newsletter blogs now. For example: there was no copy and paste function, no spellcheck and to make things even worse, I wasn’t and I’m still not a great speller to begin with. In fact, I use dictation most of the time, when I’m trying to spell words which I have difficulty with, by using them in a sentence. That old phone alone, is the main reason why I had somebody else working with me, to put the first couple of issues together, along with another person, who used to create the PDF, for those on the email list until May 2018. The newsletter has been composed on such iPhones as: iPhone 4s, iPhone 5c, iPhone SE, iPhone 8 and the iPhone SE 2020. This post and future posts will be composed on the iPhone 13 Pro, which I have in my hand at this moment. It is working well for me and sure, I had to adapt to using Face ID and forget all about touch ID, but I’m used to it now.

To close off this article of the post, I hope the newsletter lasts 10 more years. Can we do that? I really hope so because I enjoy doing it and I also hope to get you more involved as well. I want you involved because I don’t wanna be the only one who is posting things, such as links and all manner of articles. I have involved some of you because I’ve taken Facebook posts and inserted them into the newsletter blogs and I would rather you email me with some thing and if it’s worthy, I will put it here. I’m very open to hear your comments and have been, since the very beginning. The only thing I ask is that you are kind, no hate speech or anything that is derogatory. Are we all clear with that? Good now let’s get on with the rest of this issue.

Queen

This is another deviation outside the normal topic, because I can do that and it’s my blog and my newsletter. I also do this to give you a break from all this Weather Radio stuff and besides, I’m not just about Weather and WX radio and I have other interests too. I’ve talked about: The Simpsons, Family Guy, George Carlin and Monty Python, because I like all of those people and TV shows. Perhaps one day I will talk about Sesame Street and its own weather segments and for those who like the classic era of the show, there are some newer segments with Grover which are kind of weird.

Now I’d like to talk about Queen for a moment. I have been a fan of the band, but I’ve never had the chance to see them live. Despite that, I am aware of their reputation because of their stay jacked and of course, you can’t beat the incomparable Freddie Mercury as a Front man and songwriter. After all, it was he who wrote the entirety of Bohemian Rhapsody, We Are The Champions, Killer Queen, Crazy Little Thing Called Love and a bunch of other hits. If you want to know who wrote what, just look at the liner notes on all the albums, where the track listing appears. If you want to go even deeper into all the albums including the last two while Freddie was alive, that’s where Wikipedia comes in quite handy, because the albums The Miracle and Innuendo are all credited to the entire band. However, Wikipedia tells us who actually wrote a song such as The Show Must Go On, or These Are The Days Of Our Lives, among the others on the two albums.

I mention Queen here because guitarist Dr. Brian May is also an astrophysicist and he has his PhD. He also does stereoscopic photography and a bunch of other things on his plate, besides playing some smoking guitar for Queen. His weather contribution is the song Dead On Time, which is one of the band’s lesser known tracks. It’s a great rocker and it ends with a thunderstorm, which Brian recorded on his tape recorder. If you have the Live Killers album, that same storm starts it off and goes into the fast version of We Will Rock You. Anyway, let’s rock and listen to some thunder. https://youtu.be/uKoivlPUg_Y

The other reason for Queen being a part of the newsletter is because it is their 50th anniversary and if you look them up on Youtube, there is an occasional feature called Queen The Greatest, which has 50 episodes, about the band and the various highlights and probably, one or two lowlights too, such as the death of Freddie Mercury on November 24th 1991. Actually, not all episodes have been posted, as this series had started in March and will continue into 2022.

As for the movie Bohemian Rhapsody, I haven’t made an effort to see it yet and I won’t either. The closest I come to even experiencing any of the movie, is through the Bohemian Rhapsody (The Original Soundtrack), which I had purchased on iTunes in October 2018. I enjoy that, because it has some goodies which are true highlights, such as their entire set at LiveAid in 1985, complete with Freddie’s call and response with the audience.

There is another track which has some weather sounds in it, but it is long and ambient. If you are willing to take about 22 minutes out of your day, to listen to a track, which ebs and flows, be my guest. It is on the 1995 album Made In Heaven and is either called “Track 13” or simply “Untitled”, depending on which format you find it on. It was a great alarm for me, as it is quiet and eventually crescendos with rain and thunder, to an ending, with drum beats and the final word being Freddie saying “Fab.” Well, that was “fab” and now let’s get back to the regular topic, after we hear more rain and thunder, after being lulled to sleep. https://youtu.be/aqMiaS88TlE

Here is something more, proving that Freddie is a better singer than a news, sports or weather forecast presenter. In fact, he screws it up big time and it’s hilarious. https://youtu.be/YT0PYyUYi0Y

This is a post which I had done for my original blog, to which there is a link in a previous post, from March 2017. I am including it here because it looks back on something I used to do and can no longer do (as easily) because of the discontinuation of a major intercity bus service in Canada.

From 2013 to 2016, I used to post on what I called Weather Wednesday and that was where I would post about all things weather, or Weather Radio in my first blog. Back before 2018, I used to go on little day trips out of town, whether it was by myself or with someone else. Why? Because I wanted to and I love riding in buses, including highway coaches. Altho, I also miss bouncing around in a School bus and I hope to do that again someday, when all public health regulations are lifted and the current COVID-19 pandemic ends.

This article (within a post) is all about my first planned out of town bus trip in a year or so since January 2014. At first glance this may not have anything to do with weather but it does have much to do with my involvement with Weatheradio Canada. I will explain as I go along in this post so, read on.
When I go somewhere on the bus or any kind of vehicular transportation I usually take a Weather Radio receiver with me, so I can check out all the channles for VHF openings and whether all transmitters are in good working order. This served me well, when it came to reporting issues with various WXR’s along the way and in some cases, questions were answered. For example: back in 2012 the Winsor and Sarnia Ontario WXR’s were not in step with each other, even though they were technically still repeater stations of each other.

The other reason I ttake my WX radio with me is so I can keep myself entertained, besides just listening to music and now, possibly watching The Simpsons on my iPhone. I have always enjoyed listening to radio anyway, while going from city to city and that probably came from going to the school for the blind in Brantford Ontario, where most of us came from out of town and went home on Fridays and came back on Sunday evenings.
Anyway, for this trip I decided to go to Barrie Ontario, which I had been to before and could go where I usually went with some difficulty but not so much that I needed help getting from the bus terminal to my next destination. I of course, took my WX radio and some other things to keep me sain, while going both directions and just listened as we went from Toronto to Barrie, while my radio switched to the local Weatheradio Canada transmitter, located in Collingwood.
However, when I got to Barrie I had no idea that the entire transit system had been revised and there were newly named and numbered bus routes. This I found out after the fact, the next morning while just looking around on Wikipedia. I have found the information I need for my next trip to Barrie and will hopefully be much more able to find my bus to get where I want to go in Barrie.
When I went back home I was also able to make use of my newly acquired GPS app, which I have always used when I wanted to go somewhere in Toronto. I used it in Barrie too but I really wanted to use it on the way home, so I could keep track of where we were. I usually ask the driver to drop me off at a convenient store, at the corner of my street and they usually oblige. So, I use my app and was able to stay aware of where I was, despite GPS having to recalculate first. However, I made it back home and all the applicable Weatheradio Canada transmitters along the way worked just fine. I even heard the stations in Peterborough and Kawartha Lakes on the way to Barrie in the morning, as it was a clear night before with a good opening on VHF.

On an unrelated note, I also took an extra power pack with me to charge my iPhone and I certainly needed it then. My GPS ate up a lot of juice and well, I made sure to charge up the phone during the second half of my trip. I may purchase a second pack because I tried using my Crank Radio, which has a Solar panel. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to get into the sun as much as I would’ve liked to. The other problem is that it wouldn’t charge my iPhone because it isn’t powerful enough to handle it, without ac power or even the power of the sun to charge up the radio and the phone. Ah well… I’ll figure something out by the time I make my next trip out of town.
Some time later on in the summer of 2015, I did make my second trip to Barrie and this time, it was a lot more chaotic, due to traffic and I wasn’t going to be able to get home on the bus which I would usually take. On the plus side, I did manage to get home with everything charged up for when I needed it and I got my money back, from the Toronto Coach Terminal, from what would have been my trip home on Greyhound.

I went again in January 2017, to pick up a radio which I’d spotlighted in an earlier issue and that was memorable, for the wrong reasons. I got there and back all right, but I unfortunately had to deal with food poisoning the next day and if you haven’t gone through it, I don’t wish that on anybody as it’s gross and that’s all I’m gonna say.

Speaking of Greyhound, it has unfortunately been discontinued in Canada and obviously, I’m very sad and I’m not surprised about this turn of events. After all, the pandemic had basically turned our whole world upside down and hopefully by the time spring rolls around, we will be back to normal, or something resembling it as we were living before March 11, 2020. Will I ever make a trip out of town again? I don’t know, because things have changed for me. When I did my trips in 2017, I not only used a radio, but I also used one of the Weather apps which I have promoted in past issues of the newsletter. Now I happen to have a bunch of apps, along with Weatheradio Canada, I’m in good hands if I ever decide to skip town for a while.

This is for those who have an iPhone, which is compatible with iOS15 and in case you don’t know, the weather app now pushes rain and snow alerts to your iPhone. Just set it up and you are good to go. However, this video will help you set up a shortcut, to give you weather conditions on the lock screen. https://youtu.be/Hc_BKjtIsRU

Here is another link and it’s better described, for those of us who are blind and visually impaired. https://youtu.be/u-4gsfUMc78

The iOS Weather App

Let’s talk about those of us who use either iPhones or iPads and who obviously, know about the native weather application on them for a bit. Ever since I had first acquired my iPhone in 2012, the weather app has always been there. However, because it didn’t have the raw numbers from Environment Canada I didn’t use it all that much. However, in recent years I had started looking at it, especially when the weather was about to make a transition, either from fall to winter or from winter to spring and I would look at the ten-day forecast and compare that to what I have, on applications which use data from Environment Canada. I would also look at the sunrise and sunset times, to remind myself that the weather is about to change, especially in March.

Earlier this year, the weather app had started to include weather alerts and this has helped me a great deal, especially with CANWARN and sending emails to a group of people, with whom I have fired off the latest watches, warnings and advisories affecting both them and myself. This has lead to iOS 15, finally deciding to make a change to the weather app, in that it now provides rain or snow alerts. I appreciate it, but I don’t know how accurate those alerts are. After all, it might be raining outside my window and there could be no alerts pushed to my phone, stating that light rain is starting soon, or I could get an alert and nothing could come of it.

The reason for this change is because Apple has purchased an app called “Dark Sky”, or “Dark Skies” and as far as I know, it’s an American app. Either way, the change has been made and now we have the rain and snow alerts. The question is, will this eventually expand to having all manner of watches, warnings and advisories pushed to our phones from the weather app itself in the future? If so, that would cancel out a lot of other applications which do the same thing, including some apps created by governments such as WeatherCAN. However, if Apple does decide to go this direction, I hope that they don’t become scared of over-notification, by only pushing alerts when they are issued and not when they are being updated. If updated alerts are pushed, this would be a big help to those of us who are both CANWARN and SKYWARN trained and especially those, who are coordinators, (who may happen to be net controlers) reading out the latest weather alerts on a repeater, or a bunch of them within a region.

I am looking forward to see what will happen with the native iOS weather app in the future and if weather alerts will be pushed to devices. By the way, it will not deter me from listening to Weatheradio Canada and I hope that others who listen to either WXR Canada or NOAA Weather Radio won’t stop listening either, just because your phone now dings, when a watch or warning is issued. Smart phones are great, but when the power goes out they won’t work to help save your life and they are bricks, until everything is restored.

THE WATCHDOG REPORT
If you hear anything that doesn’t sound right on your local Weather Radio transmitter, there are various ways to report a problem that depend on where you live. If you live in The United States, you can call 1-888-697-7263. You can email NOAA at nwroutage@noaa.gov, or on the web at http://www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr. If you live in Canada, you can call 1-877-789-7733. You can email the National Weatheradio Canada Team at ec.wxradio.ec@canada.ca. Also, you can report it on the NOAA Weather Radio Weatheradio Canada Facebook Group. https://m.facebook.com/groups/weatheradio/

You can also email me directly at wxrnewsletter@gmail.com and it will be passed on for you. Or, you can tweet to the Weather Radio Listeners newsletter on Twitter, by following me @WxrNewsletter.
Note from the author:
I will mainly include items with a definitive time on their start to finish and ones with unknown starts or endings, I will of course include as well, but with a mention of them being unknown.

On Sunday August 1st, it was discovered that St Catharines VAD 320 had gone into watchdog and it was not restored until some time during the morning of August 2nd. However, it went back into watchdog around 3:15 AM and wasn’t restored until about 10:40 AM… the same day.

Then, on August 10th at about 3:15 AM, St Catharines VAD 320 went into watchdog. It wasn’t restored until around 8:45 AM… the same day. It had gone down again, either on Saturday, August 14 or Sunday, August 15 and was restored on the 16th.

On Saturday, August 21 add around 7:40 PM Kitchener XMJ 330 had gone into watchdog and wasn’t restored until the morning of Monday August 23rd. This had happened during a time when a bunch of severe thunderstorm watches and warnings were being issued, throughout Southern Ontario and this was the only WXR affected.

On Friday August 27th at around 9:35 AM, Toronto XMJ 225 had gone into watchdog, after being stuck since around 2:00 AM. It was restored within 15 minutes of the report.

On Monday August 30th, St Catharines VAD 320 had gone into watchdog again, after a couple of days of severe thunderstorms and all the watches and warnings which had come through. It was restored at 9:58 Am. However, it and the rest of Ontario had gone back into watchdog at around 4:15 Pm and wasn’t restored across Ontario until some time in the evening.

On Tuesday September 7th, Kitchener XMJ330 went into watchdog mode at around 1:15 PM and wasn’t restored until some time during the afternoon.

On October 9th at around 6:15 PM, XLN470 in London, had gone into watchdog and wasn’t restored until some time on Friday October 15th.

On Thursday October 14th, Kitchener XMJ 330 had gone into watchdog mode some time during the late afternoon or early evening. It wasn’t restored until Monday, October 18, just after 11:00 AM.

Say Hello 2 Weather

For many years we have been able to get our local weather on the phone, as a recording or a 1 (900) number gave those who wanted to, a chance to talk to a meteorologist. No need, because of all manner of apps and websites for us to stay up to date on the latest weather in our area.

In the past, Canadians have had to call specific numbers in order to hear the local forecast and as the author of the newsletter, I’ve called all of them and I have even used them as a guide to figure out where problems with Weatheradio Canada could be occurring. Sadly, not every region is represented and this goes for some key areas in Ontario, such as cottage country and the far north of the province. In my own case, I was toldd to call all of the numbers back in 2013, in order to check on each option in both languages and write it down. If I didn’t have unlimited Canadian calling, it would have been a really large bill. It wasn’t, but it took a week to go through everything and it gave me a new appreciation for having weather on the phone. After all, it did replace Weatheradio Canada when I couldn’t listen to it anymore on TV.

The specific numbers are all in the past, as we can now say HelloWeather, with 2 numbers to call. We can now get the information in and around our local area, along with just about anywhere else across Canada. I’ve used it and I’m very happy with what I’ve heard I can do and if you give it a couple of minutes in order to learn how it works, you will love it too.

The phone numbers are: 1 (833) 794-3556 or 1 (833) 586-3836. There are two numbers because they each Put the main focus on either English or French, depending on which phone number you call. However, you can hear either language if you call either number by pressing one on the telephone keypad when prompted. You can even hear marine forecasts and I for one have been waiting for this since about 2008 or so, when I had first heard about the possibility of a one 800 number being created, as a national number as opposed to a bunch of numbers for specific cities and areas.

Give those two numbers a try today and sure, it’s another option for those who may not have a computer or a smart phone, but I think that you will agree that getting your weather by calling a number is just as helpful as hearing it over a VHF radio, reading the text on the website or an app, or hearing about it on radio and TV. By the way, there will be a website, or a link to it somewhere on the EccC website, talking about it better than I can. It’s not ready yet and I will hopefully have a link to it in a future post.

Semi-Final Words

Since the last issue, i-Notify has come to most (if not all) of Ontario and I am quite happy with it. Besides, as I sleep with my WX radio playing, when I hear what time it is (at the end of the station ID) I know whether I have more, or less time to try and get some shuteye, after waking up before I need to get up and start my day. This also means that I no longer use my phone as an alarm clock and there for, have no music or sounds to wake me up. Besides, with my new iPhone, I want to take as much care of the battery as I can, before it degrades, or before Apple decides to include an option for battery conditioning. I’m sure it’s possible, as there are some chargers for nickel metal hydride batteries which come with that option. Either way, my phone is great and I enjoy having the opportunity, to get a new phone, as opposed to a phone which has been around for a few months before I have it in my hands.

As for i-Notify, it had come to Ontario on September 8th, after the RWT and after a severe weather outbreak. I was as surprised as anyone, when I had heard Tom and Nicolas coming out of my Midland WR300 and other radios! However, back then myself and others had some criticisms on how it sounded, because of the length of the cycle among other things. Here is what somebody had written and I have put in my own comments as well.

By the way, Marc Fitkin (who is the creator of the NOAA Weather Radio and Weatheradio Canada Facebook group) is that somebody I am talking about! He has his thoughts and I agree with him, but had to explain at least one thing he had mentioned in my reply, which you will also see here. Anyway, here is what he said, along with some of my own comments to back up what he is saying.

Thoughts, Reflections and Suggestions

So after some reflection I have some thoughts (yes there was smoke out my ears).

What I like:
-Well it’s done, after all these years, Steve and Francois can take a bow and retire.
-English male is pretty good despite some pronunciation issues, otherwise it’s generally good (this is what the Prescott CMB should have been like).

What I don’t like:
French male is awful.  I had no trouble with Francois despite my lack of French speaking ability, I at least could get a basic understanding.  Not this time.

-Extended Forecasts and AQIs need better integration. I’m not opposed to AQIs but make it part of the forecast, not its own round-up.  Extended forecast should be said once.  That’s it.  This is really bogging the cycle down.

Unknowns at least as far back as September 11th:
Alerting.  The assumption is the Ontario Egg Timer is gone.  But the big point is the format.  Will it be like a canned message with a hard EOM or a full alerting message with a hard EOM? Since then I and others in Ontario (who have migrated to i-Notify) have heard alerts go through and it’s not what it should be yet. Some of the text has been spoken and there should be more, from the text on the EC website and elsewhere, including WeatherCAN and the emails, which I have sent to myself, because of my involvement with CANWARN.

Unresolved at the time: 
The continued weirdness with the 1050Hz tone and it’s limited usage still bugs me but that’s the way it is.  I don’t agree with it but I’m just a minion.

Now, I had responded with the following below (with at least one edit since then):

I agree with your comments about the extended forecasts and if they want to do this, they should at least group full regions together, with their 7 day forecasts. For example: York and Duram like we had during the evening of Friday September 10th forecasts. They could go through all areas in the region and then, the extended forecast could play, for all of York and Durham. This is just an example and could be applied to all regions throughout Ontario with multiple sub-regions for SAME alerts.

Yes, Niclas has to be relegated to maybe the station ID messages and possibly, the RWT and RMT messages, along with either Tom or Ava. This brings me to another point I have been banging on for a while, which is that Ava should be doing the English translation for the station ID’s instead of having Tom do everything, except for alerts. If Nicolas does the French translation for the ID, I would have no problem with that. Otherwise, please give us (and any newly upgraded and transformed stations in the future) Chantal as the main French language voice on the broadcast, like they have in Quebec and Atlantic Canada.

As for the CMB, yes, it’s Ava and she sounds awful on the broadcast because it is copy and paste, like AVIPADs was. I think they wanted a female voice , because most of the people who had red out the text are female. We hear Ava doing the English translation for weather alerts and she doesn’t sound all that bad, compared to CMB, as we had heard with the water spout watch for Western Lake Ontario, on Wednesday and Thursday, along with most of Friday.

This is from two people who take an interest in Weatheradio Canada and one of us actually sold radios to the other, back in the day. Actually, I believe that we take more than a passing interest in the service as we have created: Facebook groups, newsletters and blogs between the two of us. I also can’t forget that we are both CANWARN trained and are friends with another listener, who has his own connection to Weatheradio Canada, through a streaming website. all 3 of us, take more than a passing interest in Weatheradio Canada, as two of us are ham radio operators.

Anyway, I hope that our thoughts are considered and they do what they can to fix this, to make Weatheradio Canada more listenable, to those of us in Ontario. We know that French on the broadcast has been here to stay, since 2002, but the voice needs to be changed, to be more understandable to those of us who only speak English. I also hope that they consider more variety with the voice selection in the future, with possibly having the same voices doing the forecast and round ups, doing the weather alerts along with what they are speaking now. What I am suggesting is that Tom should be voicing all of the main weather boxes, while having Ava do the station IDs and maybe even the AQI, if the AQI will continue to be in its own box in the future. As for French, we need to hear more of Chantal and less Nicolas. If the voice Selection had more variety to it, it would give the configurations more flow and it would make more sense, then what we are currently hearing on the broadcast. Besides, hearing one voice Per language (throughout the bulk of the cycle) is boring and very easily can lull you to sleep.

Also, if Weatheradio Canada wishes to survey people on the voices, why not consult with those who deal with these voices every single day first? As the author of the newsletter (who is blind from birth) I am one whom they can count on to give them honest criticism and as I have said repeatedly, I know all four voices well because they are on my iPhone.  I still have the samples I was given in 2015 and if they have any arguments about what to do with certain products, they can by all means consult with me first. They have my email address and I’m always here, as somebody who uses these voices every single day, in order to navigate my iPhone. I have to, because I can’t see and even the latest update of WeatherCAN mentions something about VoiceOver, which happens to have all 4 voices as options for download and usage. Well, I have them all and I use them all in varying degrees so, why not talk to me first, before talking to people who may not know the voices as well and are only going by samples which they are given?

Final Words

Since I had just gone on about i-Notify, let’s go back to when Weatheradio Canada had humans reading out all of the information on the broadcast. As recently as Friday, someone had posted a cycle from May 13th 1990 On YouTube, as suggested by me. That same somebody had posted an older cycle from another Weatheradio Canada station in Quebec. I had replied, asking if there was a chance of having an old cycle from Toronto XMJ 225? Yes, there was and here it is.

By the way, you will recognize one name from previous posts and The other unnamed voice you will hear is a man named Ron Huberts. I had first heard him back in 1988, on CJCL during the summer and soon after, I had started to hear him more often on the broadcast. I’m posting this, because it will give you an idea of how the forecast sounded and how the regions were grouped together, much like I had done in February 2019, with the text from January 7th and 8th with all of the forecasts, weather synopses and weather alerts in affect. I hope there are more broadcast cycles of XMJ 225 from back then available and hopefully, some of which I remember.

To be honest with you, I don’t remember this cycle, but I do remember hearing these two voices during the day. Back then, I was listening to both Weatheradio Canada and playing guitar, trying to be John Lennon. I can play, but I haven’t for a long time! Maybe some day I will get the urge to pick up the axe and whale. Actually, I still sing and at least that keeps me active musically.

Anyway, when you listen to the broadcast those of you who had only heard Weatheradio Canada as recent as the 2000s, will be shocked to hear people, reading out the text as efficiently as they did and no stumbling over words. https://youtu.be/FyZJVb9DZTQ