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
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.
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.
I'm starting to wonder how many Canadians are on Hacker News. This after seeing the BC Time Zone story as well as this one. Just curious, really. I'm wondering what the country breakdown is for Hacker News users.
The breakdown probably varies according to the time of day. In the middle of the night (for North America) I'd expect to see a higher proportion of international users, although I'd also expect the numbers aren't quite so high since HN is U.S.-centric and predominantly English only.
The number of Canadians is relatively easy to estimate though, since the geographic distribution is similar and the majority do speak English. I'd expect a roughly 8.5:1 ratio of Americans to Canadians based solely on population.
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
> Because it was the middle of the night, there were few people at local radio stations, all operated by Clear Channel with mostly automated programming. No formal emergency warnings were issued for several hours while Minot officials located station managers at home. North Dakota's public radio network, Prairie Public Broadcasting, was notified and did broadcast warnings to citizens.
If you wanted to make commercial radio even minimally acceptable as an emergency alert system you'd be... guess what... reinventing EAS and EAS-a-likes, except more expensive and less responsive! EAS never has to "Interrupt This Program" it can just get to the meat.
> If you wanted to make commercial radio even minimally acceptable as an emergency alert system you'd be... guess what... reinventing EAS and EAS-a-likes, except more expensive
Exactly, whatever it costs to operate and maintain the emergency and weather services commercial radio would need to make enough money to pay for that, and then also make enough money on top of that to stuff their pockets with profit. The people shouldn't be on the hook for those extra expenses while private companies do everything in their power to degrade the service in order to lower their costs to increase profits even farther.
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.
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.
Pretty boneheaded move. Yeah I'll download your app (???) so I can listen to critical weather information on my phone that can't even stay powered on an entire day without charging... Cool, guess I'll just take a wild guess as to how this extreme weather is going to proceed. The whole point of these services is their resilience and the fact you can depend on them. Some fragile-ass mobile phone shit is not a suitable replacement for that whatsoever. Totally inexcusable.
If 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.
Readit News
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
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.
Deleted Comment
I think the HN population is more distributed geographically then you'd initially think
I say that as a Canadian that doesn’t fit into any of those categories.
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
Purely US resident owned, not US citizen owned. Resident aliens, who are not citizens, can have ownership in an S corp.
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.
Guess I'll sell my weather radio on eBay in a few weeks, since there won't be any market for it locally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.