HFU HF Underground
General Category => General Radio Discussion => Topic started by: Looking-Glass on April 21, 2019, 1817 UTC
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I noticed the other month that both WWV & WWVH have both discontinued the Pacific Weather bulletins usually broadcast around 47 minutes past the hour, this has been a staple of WWV & WWVH for more years than I can remember.
Many a night while I was living in the Central Pacific islands was spent tuned to WWVH for the Pacific weather reports, now it has gone for good, the announcement now refers you to a web site, great if you have reliable access to the internet in the more remote areas of the Pacific, thanks, but no thanks.
It appears they are slowly chipping away at the edges of both WWV & WWVH on the road to total termination of the services in total. Nothing is sacred on shortwave radio these days, nothing! >:(
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The War Department now has broadcasts on WWV, I doubt it's going away any time soon.
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I noticed the other month that both WWV & WWVH have both discontinued the Pacific Weather bulletins usually broadcast around 47 minutes past the hour, this has been a staple of WWV & WWVH for more years than I can remember.
Many a night while I was living in the Central Pacific islands was spent tuned to WWVH for the Pacific weather reports, now it has gone for good, the announcement now refers you to a web site, great if you have reliable access to the internet in the more remote areas of the Pacific, thanks, but no thanks.
It appears they are slowly chipping away at the edges of both WWV & WWVH on the road to total termination of the services in total. Nothing is sacred on shortwave radio these days, nothing! >:(
Nothing could be further from the truth, I'm happy to report. This past Wednesday night I got to see a presentation at the Denver Radio Club by Matt Deutch NØRGT, one of WWV's longtime electrical engineers. He's going to be repeating it at Hamvention in Ohio next month, but one of the things he went over was their funding. There was a pretty big outcry at the news that they were proposing to defund it. Never mind hams who like using those signals to gauge the ionosphere; scientists and schools use all those signals for various things. The latter in particular invest in "atomic" clocks that synchronize to WWVB and were up in arms that they would suddenly be useless. Anyway, he said that they all heard enough that he's confident that their funding is secure for the foreseeable future.
The weather reports, he said, were dropped because there were potential liability issues. They had three minutes per hour to give information, and he brought up that there might be more bad weather on the seas than could be reported on in that time - while steering ships away from those hurricanes, they could potentially be driven into tropical storms. I'll emphasize that I believe he was seemed to have been giving more of an informed impression than reporting a known decision, but he was also giving it publicly as a representative of WWV, so take it for what it's worth.
And as Josh points out, we're getting new DOD broadcasts. In fact I think they were supposed to begin this weekend. I'll have to try to remember to tune in.
(https://i.imgur.com/70jbOOL.jpg)
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Bring back VNG!
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1810 UTC DOD exercise announcement @1810 4/26/19 15000 kHz Yl voice
Actually reception is crap at this time on 10 and 15 MHZ i couldn't hear much but the announcements are there