Closure of the Weatheradio service in Canada

https://www.rac.ca/rac-responds-to-the-closure-of-the-weatherradio-service-in-canada/

by da768 • 5 months ago

124 62 5 months ago

willis936• 5 months ago

Why was this done?

pyreko• 5 months ago

First guess is that it's due to the federal government cutting some stuff... and things like this are usually the first to go.

autoexec4• 5 months ago

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.

jszymborski• 5 months ago

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.

icegreentea2• 5 months ago

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.

appreciatorBus• 5 months ago

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.

Marsymars5• 5 months ago

The government hasn't made much/any public comment on it that I've seen. There is this reddit comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/1rdgh9e/start...

From one of my internal sources at ECCC, basically they’re completely overhauling the warning system right now. We had the colour coded warnings implemented in November but the real massive change is the convective alert system which is moving to free form polygons and automatic storm tracking this spring. Basically combined with the fact they’re also changing over to semi-automatic phrasing on all warnings, the cost to upgrade the weather radio network to be capable of handling the convective alert changes would be wayyy to much to warrant it. They have already had to basically completely gut the way they issue CAP files to alert ready which has delayed the project by at least a year and put the budget over by god knows how much. Given the relative low use of WRC, and the enormous cost (we’re talking in the 10s of millions here) I can understand why. I will miss it. I have fond memories of being at my cottage listening to Severe Thunderstorm warnings while watching those beautiful summer storms move over the lake. WRC will alas become another part of our history.

robmusial• 5 months ago

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.

amatecha3• 5 months ago

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.

autoexec4• 5 months ago

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)

palmotea2• 5 months ago

or private interest who wanted to repurpose these radio bands would cause such a wonderful service to go away

IIRC, the radio bands are some marine VHF channels. I'm not sure if those can be repurposed.

kotaKat• 5 months ago

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.

bhouston2• 5 months ago

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.

rapind• 5 months ago

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.

bhouston2• 5 months ago

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.

https://www.planhub.ca/planhub/coverage-map

mikestorrent• 5 months ago

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?

parl_match• 5 months ago

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.

gpm2• 5 months ago

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...

II2II• 5 months ago

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.

ssl-3• 5 months ago

I'm in the States so I can only relate from from my own perspective, but...

I've got a NOAA weather radio near my bed. It's a Midland WR120 that I picked up several years ago for $20. I've programmed in what areas I want to pay attention to, and what alerts I'm interested in for those areas.

Accordingly, it spends the vast majority of its time just sitting there in silence. Months will go by without a single peep from it.

When a selected alert happens, it comes to life automatically (courtesy of SAME messages) and announces information about it... and then silences itself again. Current alerts are also denoted by a red or yellow LED that stays alight for the duration, for a good visual indicator, and briefly summarized information also shows on the very basic character display on the front.

And, well, that's pretty good for me. We get things like tornadoes here that can flatten a neighborhood in an instant, and I'd rather survive that unscathed than to wind up dead (or, worse: permanently maimed). Proactive, broadcast weather alerts help improve my odds of success.

And unlike my community's outdoor warning sirens that are hard to hear indoors even when I'm listening for them during scheduled tests, this is loud AF inside of my house and will wake the dead.

Other than plugging into the wall for power, it will also run for a long time (days, IIRC) on the 3 AA batteries that it uses for backup power.

Now, don't get me wrong: I've also got other means, but they're all complete shit.

I've had severe weather alerts show up on my phone before (from Google and/or Verizon), but they're amazingly inconsistent with whether they'll appear or not and seemingly impossible to control. I've set up push notifications for apps that are dedicated to the purpose, but my Samsung phone loves to put apps to sleep in ways that make reliable push notifications mostly a non-starter.

In terms of computers and Internet access: Yeah, sure -- I've got computers and Internet access. But I'm not trying to hit refresh on a weather page all night just to see if a tornado is happening nearby when the weather is iffy, or to set up a computer to alert me to a weather hazard. And when the power dips here because the weather is awful, the DOCSIS network immediately goes with it. The cell phone towers, which are slow here on their very best days, also get overloaded and become unusable for data.

Running my network on batteries and/or integrating a generator and/or getting a Starlink dish for backup sounds like a fools' errand when a trio of cheap alkaline cells and a normally-silent radio will do what I need.

So anyway, weather radio is a lot more than just a thing that a person can tune into if they elect to choose to hear the weather forecast.

And Canada's service appears offer similar functionality -- with SAME messages and the whole 9 yards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatheradio_Canada#History

You guys are losing something important up there.

Marsymars5• 5 months ago

Great comment - I missed this as I was typing mine. You and I have basically the same usage, but you filled in some details I didn't include in my reply.

Marsymars5• 5 months ago

I live in a city and have a weather radio.

For me, the value isn't in the weather report, but in the SAME alerts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_Area_Message_Encoding

I don't typically keep my phone on me when I'm in the house, but my weather radio is loud enough to hear anywhere in the house, the alerts it notifies for can be configured (unlike phone emergency alerts in Canada which all broadcast at the unconfigurable ICBM-incoming level, so the result is that authorities have to be very careful of alert fatigue), it never runs out of battery, never needs software updates, never has its OS take away app permissions, etc.

So far in the four years I've had the radio the worst it's alerted me for has been severe hail (thankfully), but that's saved me thousands of dollars in damage to my cars. (And gave me time to cover my tomato plants.)

I don't know of any way to reliably replicate this type of alert even with reliable internet.

jmclnx• 5 months ago

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.

TutleCpt• 5 months ago

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.

Joel_Mckay2• 5 months ago

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

technothrasher• 5 months ago

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.

consumer451• 5 months ago

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.

adamgordonbell• 5 months ago

Canadian here. AM almost A.

I think the HN population is more distributed geographically then you'd initially think

gregdeon• 5 months ago

Canadian checking in!

beloch• 5 months ago

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.

bch• 5 months ago

Maybe @dang can setup a roll-call for entertainments sake.

nubinetwork2• 5 months ago

Not a ham, or else I probably would have seen it sooner.

opengrass2• 5 months ago

Like 60% work for the government, the rest is $18 an hour or your own hustle.

doubled112• 5 months ago

This is a surprisingly accurate feeling when you talk to people or go job hunting in major cities.

I say that as a Canadian that doesn’t fit into any of those categories.

teuobk2• 5 months ago

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

Aloha3• 5 months ago

I'd actually assume closer to 100km of coverage, 60 miles or so is a conservative estimate of coverage, in the prairies I would expect it to go much further - 500w of output on high band VHF goes quite quite far - I know how far the US NWS stations cover, and its much closer to 60+ miles.

teuobk2• 5 months ago

Environment Canada assumes 60 km on their Weatheradio page ( https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services... ), so that's what I went with. Having said that, I very much agree that the range is probably considerably greater in many cases.

Marsymars5• 5 months ago

While there are a handful of 500W stations, most are in the 100-200W range: https://www.qsl.net/ve7hce/weatherradio.htm

opengrass2• 5 months ago

Only boaters use this.

stego-tech• 5 months ago

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.

msla• 5 months ago

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.

autoexec4• 5 months ago

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.

acchow• 5 months ago

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

Aloha3• 5 months ago

Only at the point of emission however...

tokyobreakfast2• 5 months ago

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.

amatecha3• 5 months ago

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.

ipcress_file• 5 months ago

So I'm guessing that this is what those stylish wood grain Weatheradio cubes in the Radio Shack catalog were for?

oldnetguy• 5 months ago

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.

autoexec4• 5 months ago

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.

nubinetwork2• 5 months ago

I'd be willing to bet that the government didn't want to run it anymore, so they asked pelmorex...

pelmorex probably said "pay me", and the government said "well I guess we'll just shut it down"...

arian_• 5 months ago

Replacing a system that works with no internet, no power grid, and no account with "just use your phone" is not an upgrade.

jdalgetty• 5 months ago

One less thing to listen to on my radio scanner :(

tokyobreakfast2• 5 months ago

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.

Marsymars5• 5 months 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.

Aloha3• 5 months ago

This seems insane, particularly given the short notice period for the shutdown.

bkd• 5 months ago

Related I think - The Hello Weather/Bonjour Météo Canada toll-free 833 phone numbers are shutting down on March 16th if that hasn't been mentioned.

I archive daily calls to selected time-and-temp phone numbers 1-833-794-3556 # Hello Weather Canada (English) 1-833-586-3836 # Hello Weather Canada (French) I'm archiving these until they go dark. I'll probably put the calls immediately before and after on my YT time-and-temp channel.

palmotea2• 5 months ago

Is this the Canadian equivalent of the US NOAA Weather Radio service? If so, that sucks. The last Tornado Warning in my area did not trigger the weather alert of my phone, but it did trigger our weather radio.

It's also very useful for people who don't speak English, as you can just set up a weather radio in their home with only the severe alerts enable, then simply explain "if this makes noise, shelter in place."

Edit: Guess so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatheradio_Canada. I wonder if this is some kind "decoupling" with the US, as the article states it "is an official partner of the [US] National Weather Service," and the decommissioning seems abrupt and no reason was given.

ToddWBurgess• 5 months ago

I am a ham radio operator and also a member of Radio Amateurs of Canada. As we all know, the weather can be a matter of life and death and it is important Canadians have access to the latest weather. I am glad that RAC is taking up the cause for Canadians. In many parts of the country weather radio services parts of the country that don't have reliable Internet or AM/FM radio broadcasts. 73

Closure of the Weatheradio service in Canada

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