The service, which uses the callsign CHU, has operated in one form or another since the 1930s. CHU is the Canadian equivalent of the US's WWV & WWVH time signal services that operate from both Colorado and Hawaii.
Canada's National Research Council, the government agency that runs the time signal service, states the shut-down is necessary because the analog signal is no longer needed in the era of the internet and things like GPS and network time protocol (NTP) servers. I also understand there's an issue with the age of the transmitters used at both of the transmission sites. It's a cost-cutting measure.
To be fair, the US's terrestrial time signal services have been a target of government cost cutters in the past, as recently as the first Trump administration. Federal bean counters argue that nobody tunes in to listen to the 'beep, beep, beep' of the signal anymore. The push-back was always pretty immediate, from sources as varied as the US Department of Defense, the ham radio community, maritime services and the scientific community, which uses the signal to test things like minute changes in the atmospheric layers during severe storms or eclipses. As a result, the US National Institute of Science & Technology has done a lot to modernize the WWV & WWVH signals to deliver more than just audio beeps. There's a digital component to the signal that is used by automated systems for time synchronization, and the the NIST will add short voice broadcasts that provide information about ongoing experiments involving the time signal, announce system maintenance activities, coordinate government exercises, and more. The service also acts as something of an old-school 'dead hand' alert - if one or both stations suddenly go off the air, various federal agencies are instructed to come up on their own radio frequencies for information and instructions. Very Doctor Strangelove-ish 😄. So, I think the US-based time signal service is safe, for now.
Back to Canada. Oh, Canada, is this headlong rush to internet-based services a wise move? Remember, Canada shut down their broadcast weather alert system back in March, claiming the internet was the solution to all things, and the old weather alert service (similar to our NOAA Weather Radio) was redundant and unnecessary. Plus, it was, as federal bureaucrats love to say, 'too expensive to maintain'. Since something like 80% of the Canadian population lives within just a few miles of the US/Canada border and can receive NOAA weather radio broadcasts, I expect a lot of Canadian weather geeks are buying NOAA weather radios and programming in the nearest US county SAME codes to help maintain situational awareness. Canada seems headed down the path of many countries in shutting down older terrestrial transmission services in favor of that new solution to all problems - 'the cloud'. While this makes sense for small countries like Belgium or Costa Rica, for countries with vast territories, terrestrial broadcast services still make a lot of sense. Think of countries like the US, Canada, Australia (which is a land mass as large as the US lower 48), Russia, China, and even the small island nations that are dotted across thousands of square miles of the Pacific Ocean. Many of these countries have fragile infrastructure and isolated population centers scattered across their territories. For them, old-fashioned terrestrial broadcast services still make a lot of sense, in large part because all that's needed to receive the signal is an inexpensive battery powered radio.
Sadly, the internet and the web services delivery paradigm has caught the eye of cost-cutting bureaucrats across the developed world. Why keep a cranky, expensive radio transmitter running when you can just 'go to the cloud' with the same service?
So, goodbye to the Canadian time service. You served faithfully for almost 100 years. Here's hoping nobody south of the border looks at your example and says, "Hey, that a good idea".
W8BYH out
