Weather Radio Listeners Newsletter for November 1st 2022
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Weatheradio_Canada.html
Hello and welcome to the 4th issue of the newsletter for 2022. Well, it’s November and winter is on the way. Need I say more?
To start things off, I should acknowledge iOS 16, for those who may not have downloaded it yet and who have an iPhone 8, or later. A few things to take from this is that the download was huge, about 3 gb and change for the initial release. Secondly, we have new voices including Eloquence, which is used on computers with a screen reading software called JAWS, which means Job Access With Speech. JAWS is a screen reader much like VoiceOver is for iPhones and iPads and obviously, is meant for use by blind and visually impaired people, like myself. The male voices are similar to the late Stephen Hawking and his computer, with much the same inflections. Altho, Eddy and Reed are the main male voices, with a grandma, grandpa and a couple of female voices in there for good measure.
We have other new voices, which are familiar to those who have used Apple for many years before the iPod and iPhone. For example: Bruce is now on iPhones, along with a couple of children in the form of Joelle and Noelle. We have: Agnes, Bruce, Fred, Junior, Kathy and Ralph, among other voices. We even have a bunch of novelty voices, which actually sing. For example: one of the voices will actually serenade you with the tune of In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg. There are other voices like that, which are in this podcast episode back in June, among others. https://www.applevis.com/podcasts/sneak-peek-additional-non-us-english-voices-coming-voiceover-ios-16
As for the US voices, we have them, altho the inflections of Tom, Ava, Chantal and Nicolas are a little different from how i-Notify speaks. They are the same voices, just that the vocal pitch for some words is different. There is a post on those voices too and here it is. https://www.applevis.com/podcasts/sneak-peek-additional-us-voices-coming-voiceover-ios-16
The one problem I have with iOS 16 and the voices is that sound quality has been sacrificed for the more human sounding voices and this is because the downloads are smaller for all of the classic voices from when VoiceOver was introduced to today. However, it has gotten better since iOS 16.1 and hopefully, if enough people bring voice quality to Apple’s attention, this can be nipped in the bud. My favourite of the new voices is Matilda, which is one of the Australian voices and she sounds really nice. The Siri voices have been left unchanged and that’s fine.
I am going to repeat something I had inserted into the RWT post on October 26th, for those who didn’t get the opportunity to read it. This is sad that I have to talk about it, but that is the way things are going now.
What I’m about to say affects those of us who are CANWARN trained and who live in the GTA. Having gone to numerous training sessions at Environment Canada, this is upsetting to say the least, on top of Weatheradio Canada shutting down transmitters as they see fit.
Major renovations are taking place at EC HQ at 4905 Dufferin St, with all of the offices being made in to an open concept from the small offices. This will effect the Canwarn room as well! The Canwarn room has been decommissioned. My friend Ward Kenedy had gone to EC on the morning of October 11th and removed all the radio equipment. He hopes to go back in a couple of weeks to remove the antennas that remain on the roof. He has his working at heights but permission has to be granted for Ward to access the roof. In the future Canwarn nets will be run from Ontario Science Center (OSC) or Ward’s residents when he is not at work. The call sign for CANWARN still remains VE3YZW, as he has also removed all the maps and sheets that were on the walls.
Many thanks to Environment Canada for all the years they have supported the Canwarn program across Canada. Things have gone this direction since social media took off with Twitter, Facebook etc. for those of us who are reading this and who are trained spotters and who also are hams, you are encouraged to still use Amateur radio for weather reports as well as social media. It’s important to remember Canwarn got its roots started in Amateur Radio. In a post on Facebook, Ward had included a couple of pics from the day he had gone to ECCC to remove the equipment and paper. It’s a shame that things have gone down this road and it’s hard to say who will be at ECCC a year from now. This is bad for CANWARN to lose the HQ in the economic engine of Ontario and this more than likely means that training sessions will no longer be held at Environment Canada HQ, with the last one in May 2019, where we couldn’t get a tour of the radio room, or anywhere else because of flooding, elsewhere in Ontario. Goodbye Environment Canada HQ, we’re going to miss you as we are no longer allowed in.
I know that I’m not the only one who is disappointed about this and this does relate to Weather Radio, as others had commented. I had included Bruce Jones’s email to me about this and I will put it here again, with another comment from another frequent contributer, as of late.
It’s rather disappointing, Gord.
Since so many of the “Original Crew” of Weatheradio Canada have retired, there are fewer people to maintain the passion and support for it. On an all-automated system younger meteorologists don’t get to broadcast live, so they never experience weather radio as anything more than another computer sitting in a corner of the office, running itself. And because there is no “studio request line” allowing feedback from, and interaction with, listeners….they may have few feelings in favor of the system and its positive impact on people. In fact, many of these young mets have only negative interactions with weather radio, like when their transmitters act up and repairs are necessary.
On the other hand, young meteorologists have positive hands-on experience with their cell phones every single day, so when comparing and contrasting cell phones and weather radio, their gut reaction is obvious. Only when you study the tragic history of unreceived warnings do you intellectualize the necessity of having multiple, redundant ways of receiving those messages. But is that enough to overcome one’s gut feelings?
My two teenagers never had clock radios on their nightstands so they are somewhat unacquainted with the entire medium of radio. Those of us who support emergency communications via the radio spectrum must use our experience and knowledge to educate younger generations, because they will understand these issues only if we help them to. Positively impacting government decision makers is our ultimate task, but we have to lay the groundwork, especially among weather and emergency management professionals.
Keep fighting, Gord!! There are many, many people who understand the importance of what you’re doing. Thanks for helping us build a Weather-Ready Nation!
Bruce Jones
Midland Radio Corporation
Now, for another comment from our frequent contributer.
It’s sad for CANWARN guys losing their room at Environment Canada’s HQ in Toronto. I DO hope it’s just because they’re re-doing their HQ office and not as a lack of commitment of Environment Canada into CANWARN. Radars and computer models can do only so much: You guys are the ears and eyes of Environment Canada!
Bruce’s e-mail is VERY interesting (and sad too) to read. I will add that many meteorologists who have retired were there when SAME event made its debut 15+ years ago, and for some, when it was all about automated tapes and having to actually speak before a microphone to record their weather forecast. Younger meteorologists don’t have such direct connection with weather radio.
Since the weather radio service got automated with AVIPADs and further with i-Notify, it’s about computers that generate the content and vocalize it. I’m surprised that meteorologists still manage it. That should be the job of IT people and for meteorologists to continue to focus on the content.
The best example is a car driver. Our license proves that we’re competent to drive a car, but very few car drivers are also competent mechanics!
Most issues affecting the network these days seem to be IT-related issues (for instance, I’m thinking of Salt Spring Transmitter that has lost its feed, during my Vancouver vacations). Meteorologists aren’t IT people! It takes keen know-how to troubleshoot computer problems, at this point! Likely far more complex than the tape system from yesteryears! A level of complexity that is definitively well outside of meteorology. Even more so when you’re a young meteorologist, therefore you don’t have prior experience with the service. So I can certainly understand why meteorologists have only negative experience with weather radio service.
That said, it’s not a reason to dismantle it…
I should also acknowledge a shocking passing I had recently learned about, thanks to a friend. I had posted something on Facebook, which I will get into in a bit and this leads me to the death in question. Peter Staples had passed away on October 16th 2021. I knew that he had heart issues and unfortunately, that’s all I know, as he had joked on Twitter once that he had the heart of an 85 year-old. No matter how he had shuffled off this mortal coil, it’s really sad that I had to find out a year later and because of a post on Facebook I had done, which was about something I will talk about later.
Peter was one of my first followers on Twitter and we leaned much the same way politically. Altho, I never did get into a political discussion with him because I detest politics in general.
He was always helpful and a gentleman, when it came to the newsletter and great to chat with on the phone. I had both spoken with him and had emailed him many times, about issues with the various ATADs and WXRs and he had always tried to explain what was going on, as best he could. The last time I had heard his voice on Weatheradio Canada, was when the station IDs were being changed in September 2007, from AVIPADs to a human recording them. He didn’t speak French and neither do I, but I understand enough to know what is being said on Weatheradio Canada, even with Chantal and Nicolas, from listening to the broadcast and hearing both the English and French translations of the configuration. It also helps that I had learned French in school, but I haven’t retained a lot of it. I know my numbers and letters, but if you expect me to cary on a conversation in French, fat chance. I understand what is being said, but I do not speak French, even with the newer voices because I had to learn Chantal and Nicolas’s syntax when it comes to pronouncing city, region and town names in Canada. For example: unlike the old AVIPADs French translation, city, regions and town names in English are accented with i-Notify, while they were not on AVIPADs. For example: Durham, York, Kitchener, Burlington, Irillia, Barrie, Collingwood and many other examples of non-accented names on AVIPADs, are accented with i-Notify in the French translation. It’s a shame that Peter had retired in 2016, 5 years before i-Notify would come to be and would pass away, less than a month after Collingwood and Toronto would be among those making the switch from AVIPADs to i-Notify.
I was not informed about Peter’s death, until September 23rd and I wish that those of us who are known volunteers of Weatheradio Canada, could be better informed of any news on people involved with the network, who had an important roll to play in keeping it humming. Peter was a Dissemination Specialist and it simply involved making sure that Weatheradio Canada was running as it should. In his case, Peter was the DS for Ontario until 2016, when someone else had taken over.
Thanks to Peter, I had learned about why dial-up and FTP sound the way it did on Weatheradio Canada and Peter was also one of the many voices we had heard, when meteorologists simply read out the public forecasts, synopsis, weather conditions, marine forecasts, marine conditions, severe weather alerts and climate data, among other things throughout the year. The last time I had heard him on Weatheradio Canada during that period was probably some time during the fall of 1988 and the last time I had heard him either on Weatheradio Canada or CJCL 1430 was on January 1st 1989, with Phil Chadwick talking to whom ever was on air at the time, during a scheduled break in the music of someone’s life. I wish I could remember exactly when the last time I had heard Peter on Weatheradio Canada during those days, but I do remember the first time hearing him. It was on Good Friday of 1988 and he was doing the 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM shift, after John Laid had done the 12 hour shift overnight, with Torben Anderson on the day before.
RIP and thanks for helping me and others when we had questions and had noticed issues with the broadcast. Also, thanks for the help with the newsletter in the early days, years before the blog.
The Weather Radio Listeners Newsletter Net
If you have been a long time reader of the newsletter (before the blog) you know that I used to conduct a ham radio net about this service, called The Weather Radio Listeners Newsletter Net. It had gone through a couple of variations on the name, but the main topic was always the same, which is of course Weather Radio, in both Canada and the US.
Sometimes we had guests from Environment Canada and Weatheradio Canada, thanks to friendly help, from both hams and the guests themselves. We had: Arnold Ashton on September 22nd 2012, Peter Staples on October 6 2012 and Denis Paquette on July 7th 2013. All 3 were my idea and I would have liked to have more, but it was a question of logistics and whether guests had time to do it. Plus, this was going out over ham radio and I had to use my phone in order for two of the guests to be heard, as well as taking down call signs in order to log them for the net. In the case of Arnold Ashton, I had help from my friend Ward Kenedy, as he went to Environment Canada at Downsview and helped set it up, both figuratively and literally. Basically, Arnold’s voice went over a ham radio in the Weather Offices ham radio room and it made things easier for me, to control the net and log it for myself.
All 3 guests took questions from myself and others who had checked into the net and my favourite one was when Peter Staples was the guest, because a lot of hams came out of the would work, to ask questions about various topics. Even the blackout of 2003 came up and of course, I have included most of the questions in past posts of this blog, at least a couple of times. Otherwise, the net was basically a check in net and that was it.
I tried to make things interesting with doing a topic once in a while, but unfortunately, things just didn’t work out and towards the end of the net, it was rather quiet. Can you say, pulling teeth? After a while, I dreaded doing another session because of me being the only net controller and I wasn’t happy with being the only voice, singing the songs and making things worse, was the fact that there didn’t seem to be all that much interest in the net, over the long term and obviously, that makes me sad to say it, but it’s true. I mean, this was about a service provided by the federal governments of both Canada and the US and there was only so much we could talk about, aside from weather apps which I don’t mind getting into as long as the information is helpful and accurate. However, with the new voices on both NWR and Weatheradio Canada, there are people who would love to express their opinions. Unfortunately, some of them may be negative and I don’t want negativity on my net.
Will I ever consider bringing it back? I had thought about it in August 2020, before the first decommissioning announcement was made and I’m still considering it. However, a lot of things have to be in place before I consider it worth resurrecting. First of all, there has to be a core group of people, who want the net to return and who will certainly check in every single week and hopefully provide ideas. Secondly, I need repeaters and linking systems, in order to give the net a far reach throughout all of North America. Thirdly, there has to be some sort of demand from other hams, who would like it if I would bring back the net and on the other end, they have to hold up their end of the deal by checking in and helping me out with any and all of the logistics, including repeaters and linking systems, which are very important in order for us to reach a wider audience or over VHF and 440 repeaters. Also, the hope is that they become regulars and provide ideas and regular reports on any and all that has to do with Weather Radio. If they can help with setting up guests to come on the net and talk to us all, that’s a bonus. I have ideas, but I don’t want to be the only one doing all the work.
Lastly and on a similar note, would I want to do it, if nobody else wants to do net control? There was one net where I had no choice, but to do that while riding a Greyhound Bus on the way home, because nobody wanted to do it that night, or nobody was available to pick up the slack for me. I don’t necessarily hate the sound of my own voice, but I don’t want to be the only front man for the net and I don’t want it to be all me, all the time. I think of it as a musician and as a singer, like I wouldn’t want to do all of the yelling on stage. Consider a band like Queen, or The Beatles, or The Rolling Stones who have a frontman, but others are allowed to sing songs once in a while. The difference is that this is a ham radio net and net control would be on a rotation and the only stipulation is that everything would go to me, including net logs and any final decisions are mine. Thankfully, I’m pretty flexible and I don’t like to necessarily boss people around. Basically, I like to be in charge, but I like others input at the same time and if what they are saying is either on the same page with me or can convince me too stretch out, then I would approve of it. Like I said, I’m pretty easy-going and open to any and all ideas, as long as they’re beneficial to the net.
For now, the net will be dormant for the time being until I decide, or the demand for one is decided for me and it Hass to be a very loud outcry, in order for the net to even consider being brought back. Things have changed since 2015, like the pandemic not allowing us out a lot and I don’t know what the COVID-19 restrictions are when going into Radioworld and I don’t have an account with them at this time. I also don’t like going there by myself, as it is a pain to get there and back if you are a blind person and someone who relies on taking public transit. Also, money plays into it and whether they have what I need anymore, namely the specific battery pack for my handy-talkie or an earpiece. Neither of these things are pressing issues at the moment, but they will be in the future so, I hope that if there is a demand for the net, I will get equally the same amount of support.
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. Please cc me at this email address if you choose to fire off an email to either netowrk. You can also report problems on Twitter @WxrNewsletter and by all means, follow me at this account too.
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. I will be missing some things, but I am only putting in items which I know (more or less) when things went wrong and when everything was alright again and we could get back to normal activities.
On August 16 at 3:40 PM EDT Station XMJ330 Kitchener went off air very briefly for 5 to 10 seconds.
On August 19th, this video was posted on Youtube. https://youtu.be/K0bb2CqMfyE
In other words, here we go again!
On August 26th, XLM 647 in Charlottetown was off the air. No word on when it had come back.
On October 5th, XOF962 Cooking Lake and Brockville VFK-721 had gone off the air. That is all .
On Tuesday September 27th, the Toronto, Niagara and other WXRs in Ontario had stopped updating some time during the afternoon. I wasn’t sure if all of Ontario was affected, but because Toronto and St Catharines were not moving forward with updates, my guess was probably good that others had also fallen behind too. What ever the problem was, it was fixed some time during the evening.
On October 5th, Toronto XMJ 225 had gone dead for about 17 minutes, after the RWT and RMT tests. It’s a mystery as to what had happened and why it had happened.
On October 6th, Toronto XMJ225 had suddenly sounded the NMN message at about 8:37 AM and I don’t know what had happened, except that the hourly reports were not updated in the next cycle. I have no idea when it had been fixed, as I had planned to go out and run an errand for myself, as well as go to Tim Hortons for something to eat and drink. When I had returned home, everything was alright again.
During October, one of our contributers was in BC and had noticed something very wrong, with the local WXR. Here is the email he had written to Weatheradio Canada and the response he would get soon after.
Hello,
I am a user of Environment Canada’s weather radios for many years. I am currently on vacations in British-Columbia and I am also a member of Gord’s weather radio group on facebook.
I’ve noticed since yesterday afternoon that station XKK506 serving the Victoria area seems to have lost its feed. It is airing continuously in English and French that “programming will be delayed”.
I’ve also noticed that at other times of the day, there was complete silence. The transmitter is still on, but obviously it is getting no sound input whatsoever.
Is there some maintenance going on, or is there a problem that needs to be fixed?
Also, if this is a sign that the station is experiencing problems and input from the public is sollicited, may I suggest to add this “pre-recorded” message the phone number and e-mail address, like during normal broadcast?
Gord gracefully helped me with your coordinates. I am on vacations in this part of the country for 3 weeks and I have just a tablet for internet access, so I don’t have the usual tools that I have back at home! Thanks!
Regards,
-Jacques Pannetier
We got two replies and I will give you both of them here.
Hello Gord,
Please pass the information below on to Jacques.
The Victoria/Salt Spring Island transmitter has had ongoing internet connection issues. We will have a tech onsite next week to replace our equipment and get us back up and broadcasting.
Once again, we appreciate your feedback as it helps improve our service. As you suggest, we are investigating adding our contact information and perhaps the site ID to the technical difficulties message. Due to programming timelines, this could take some time, so please bear with us.
Kind regards,
Dayna McIntyre
Dissemination, Meteorological Service of Canada
Environment and Climate Change Canada / Government of Canada
Another reply from someone else on the team, with a familiar last name, but I don’t think they are related.
Bonjour Jacques,
Thank you for reporting a problem with our station XKK506, Mount Bruce in Victoria BC.
We were aware of the situation and there was a repair visit made on the weekend to restore the internet connectivity. As of yesterday, the site was broadcasting again with up to date weather information.
About the content included when the station fell in what we call the “degrade” mode, the “contact us” messages is included but it may be delayed and take time to reload after power or internet outages, which was unfortunately the case in Mount Bruce.
I hope this answers your questions.
Thank you,
Jean-Francois Trudeau
Weatheradio Technician – Voice Technology Unit
Meteorological Service of Canada – Environment and Climate Change Canada
On October 30th, I was tagged in a post on a Facebook group I co-administrate. XLM647 is now looping there station ID . Gord Maybee can you fire off an email? I did and this may be to be continued, as it was still looping the last time I was informed about this WXR.
On October 27th I had received this from a friend, whose name had appeared earlier in this post and it certainly sounds interesting, but obviously not good.
MANITOULIN AMATEUR RADIO CLUB Inc, Listening to the Sudbury Weather Radio 162.400 on the scanner. Approximately every 5th word is repeated 5 times. I think they may know they have a problem, but their phone number to report problems is now 20 digits long with the looping. Altho, it seems that we have a problem with other transmitters in Canada, experiencing stuttering on the broadcast, in both the English and French cycles and even the sation ID messages.
Thanks to Ward Kenedy for the initial message and I hope that if the problem with Sudbury and other WXRs was still present (when those who are at the controls) can fix it, or it may have rectified itself. May this story be to be continued? Might we hear an announcement about a survey, simply asking whether the local station is having any problems like this?
Many Final Words
To be continued, as far as comments go with the problem I had just highlighted. Some people think that i-Notify may be overloaded and they could be right, as there may be too much information coming through. Besides, all of the forecasts are 7 day and not the 48 hours for most in the configuration, eliminating some marine forecasts and some areas which were or may still be in the coverage maps, but not on the broadcast. For example: City of Hamilton no longer being a part of the Toronto configuration. Here is a couple of thoughts from listeners on this matter.
At first glance, it looks to me like either a severely overloaded computer or the text stream isn’t coming fast enough to the vocalizer, so it keeps repeating the last word. Either that, or the vocalizer is reading gibberish!
I’m kind of curious whether it’s also happening with the English voice.
Around my area in Southern Québec, I’ve just checked Montréal and Sherbrooke stations and they’re both OK in French and English. So it seems that it is affecting some parts of the network and not others.
Yes. It’s happening in both English and French cycles.
Actually, the CPU hits maximum ram, an unfortunate issue with INOTIFY. It is pretty funny though.
Yikes! Hitting maximum RAM over the time (hence the impression of a severely overloaded machine as it crawls to a snail’s pace, frantically swapping memory to pagefiles back and forth as an attempt to get programs running nonetheless) usually means there’s a serious memory leak from a program. A classic IT problem.
Thanks for the infos!
What should be done is only include the 7 day forecast for the main area mentioned in the Station ID message. If people want to know the entire 7 day outlook for their local area (outside of the city of license), they can easily download WeatherCAN, go on the ECCC weather website, or watch The Weather Network and read the local forecast on the screen. With Hello Weather, that can be left as is, as it is a telephone service and if people want to key in where they live, it’s just a matter of knowing the numbers, VS. the letters of the alphabet they represent. For example: Toronto would translate numerically on the telephone keypad as 867686. Altho, just key in 8676 and it should work. Remember that ABC represents 2, DEF 3, GHI 4, JKL 5, MNO, 6 PQRS 7, TUV 8 and WXYZ 9, with 0 a spacebar and one for punctuation marks, depending on how many times you press it. I had to learn that and when I started texting and emailing in 2011, I had to remember that with the phone I used to have, when starting this newsletter.
Onto another topic, I am not happy about how things are going with Weatheradio Canada right now and this has been so, since August 2020. Why contraction, as apposed to expantion of the network? WeatherCAN will not save your life, if you do not have internet or cellular connectivity in an emergency. Obviously, July 8th and the Rogers outage hasn’t taught anybody on the team the lesson that should’ve been learned, that you need redundancy, when one goes down the other can step in and help. If a major emergency knocks out all telecom companies (including Internet services), how are we going to be able to use WeatherCAN, if Weatheradio Canada is discontinued in our local area? Please explain how I could have used the app, when it couldn’t even locate me during the outage.
Even satellites can be knocked out to, so the last remaining form of communication is radio. Just ask those of us who are hams and I have made no bones about the fact that I have been one since 2009. I got into the hobby, because of CANWARN and Weatheradio Canada and NWR happen to be somewhat tied to ham radio. However, I have listened to and knew of Weather Radio long before I was licensed, after passing my exam.
I know that there are those in Weatheradio Canada who understand the importance of the network yackety-yacking away, in more cities, towns, villages and hamlets across Canada, in case severe weather happens to strike. Unfortunately, there are others who do not realize how important redundancies are, in case something unthinkable happens. Could you predict what happened on July 8 with Rogers? How about the exact damage that the May 21st derecho would do? The answer is obviously know, because those in charge are not psychics and do not have mystical powers and there for, are not in fallible, meaning that the decision to try and shut down transmitters is foolish. The whole idea of both NWR and Weatheradio Canada broadcasting weather information is to be there, in case of an emergency, where as The Weather Network and The Weather Channel are only TV stations. Sure, they provide weather information and inform us if we have a severe weather watch or warning in affect, but it’s all about entertainment. Weatheradio Canada and NOAA Weather Radio are not meant to entertain, because of their mandate to be there, in case things hit the fan. The two TV channels have people who are on-air presenters and some are more entertaining than others. For example: Jim Cantore being a thunder snow magnet, with the most famous example being the Groundhog Day storm of 2011. Remember this? https://youtu.be/qJt4nV6hM1Y
I know, that was a lot and the main reason for why I said what I did is because, I wanted to impress how important it is on those who are younger who work at ECCC, because we didn’t have smart phones and social media in the old days. Back in the 80s, we had radio and TV and the early versions of a cellular phone, which were apparently the size of a brick. I don’t know, but that’s what I was told by those on radio, as well as comedians. Now that we have the iPhones and android devices, it’s easy to get bog down in the thinking that Radio is less relevant. Well, it’s not and despite the plethora of radio applications for various companies such as iHeart (in both Canada and the US), you can’t replace an old-fashioned radio on a desk, or a night table, or somewhere where you can listen to it. The same is true for those of us who listen to Weather Radio and despite the plethora of weather applications out there, including the native weather app for the iPhone and now the iPad, Weather Radio is the best. However, it is being hobbled by the lack of human voices on the broadcast and it is meteorologist who have to deal with any issues, as opposed to those who are strictly technical people. I will grant you that there are those who are smart enough who are working for both NWR and Weatheradio Canada, but not everybody is tech savvy. Even me who uses an iPhone is not tech savvy. I am iOS and iPhone savvy, but it doesn’t mean I can develop my own software, application or a podcast. I can write a blog post and I can navigate the phone, but it does not make me tech savvy except to those whom I’ve helped over my time as a user of iOS.
So, eliminating stations from Weatheradio Canada must not and cannot continue, because there are areas of Canada which may need the service and who don’t have it yet. For example: far northern Ontario doesn’t have a transmitter and to be honest, who is listening in northern Canada? If you’re going to get rid of stations, why not take a look at the north and start picking off those left and right in the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut? I’d like to know who is listening there and if nobody is, have at it with all three regions I mentioned and leave all 10 provinces alone. In fact, why not expand on the network in the provinces first, before deciding to pick off stations which are seemingly unnecessary? If there are people listening in the north, keep those stations around and if anything, expand the network further throughout Canada. If you don’t believe me, watch and listen to this video with Bruce Jones, correctly speaking about why we all should have Weather Radios in our homes. Weather applications are good, but they can not save your life if the internet goes down. https://youtu.be/E8ff2i7UjD8
Another thing which needs to be spoken about here is the native iOS Weather app, which does push severe weather alerts to the US and Canada, but it seems to only push warnings and every other level of alert only shows up, minutes after a watch, or statement had been issued. For example: there was an Air Quality Statement issued for Toronto and Mississauga on October 24th and it had showed up after I had received the alert from WeatherCAN, with no pushing. How is that going to help to save the life of someone, who has a compromised immune system, with asthma or possibly other breathing problems?
The weather app still pushes notifications about rain or snow starting and stopping at ones current location and I don’t mind that, as long as it is accurate. It would be rather embarrassing to find out that there was no notification for rain starting in a persons location and then, they go out and get an unwanted shower. Conversely, if there was a notification that rain was going to stop soon and it didn’t, or that it would start soon and it didn’t, the results could speak for them selves. I mean, how truly accurate is the weather app anyway when it comes to predicting accuracy of when precipitation will start and stop in my current location?
To bring this to an end, let’s do it on a high note. First, let’s meet the developer of an app which benefits not just those who are sighted, but those who are blind and it’s a weather app. https://www.applevis.com/podcasts/applevis-extra-49-interview-developer-weather-gods
Lastly, let’s break away from what we usually talk about and here is a tune from a band I like. They are from Los Angeles California and the singer makes wine. https://youtu.be/BNTo34xOwoM
There is another part to this song and you will understand why I have put it here, when you hear the sound affects under the music. Yes, Tool are one of my 5 favourites along with: Queen, Metallica, Slipknot and Pantera. They are easily one of the most mysterious bands in rock and they have a sense of humor. For example: what is Lachrymology,? It’s a pseudo religion which is the study of crying, or something to do with emotional pain. Actually, it doesn’t exist and it is a ruse, in order to fool their fans.
If you want to read up on Tool, use Google and I’m sure that you will find plenty of sources with information on the band. Some of it may be mis-information, or dis-information so, be careful. Either way, they are a great band with great musicianship and mostly long songs with more than one movement.
Anyway, let’s all have a great rest of 2022 and let’s all be back here, healthy and safe in February 2023. https://youtu.be/qJq9y9xPKWs