Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, David Iurescia, who shares the following news from Radio New Zealand:
RNZ’s pips are changing – Can you hear the difference? (RNZ)
RNZ National is changing the pips – the beeps that mark the start of each hour which play immediately before the news bulletin broadcast.
The pips were last changed in 2013 when a lightning strike damaged the clock which sent signals from the Measurement Standards Laboratory’s atomic clock.
The replacement sound was a little higher. (Continue reading…)
The ABC in Australia did away with the pips last year:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-23/abc-switches-off-the-pips-irrelevant-digital-age-smartphones/103137592
I think it’s nice that the BBC and RNZ still use them.
Jason,
The reason why the ABC removed the pips which have been gone for many years in Western Australia is because of the delay in getting the pips from Sydney which is 3300 km away, as the crows fly but the cable distance is a lot longer. ABC Radio is also available on the Viewer Accessed Satellite TV system. There is a variable delay of around 250 ms just getting the signal to and from the satellite and there is encoding and decoding delays in addition to that. So it is never accurate because even geostationary satellites move. Now the ‘George the talking clock’ from Telstra has also gone. The most accurate time comes from multiple satellites used by GPS receivers. Since longitude is essentially the time, the satellites are transmit the exact UTC time and the satellite location. The receiver will work out the path length to compensate for the delay and then average the result from multiple satellites. These satellites are also compared with more than 30 caesium beam clocks and the errors averaged and the average is used to correct the caesium beam clocks. In addition they have to be corrected for leap years and leap seconds because the earth’s rotation is very slowly reducing making each day very slightly longer.
That was a pip of a story!