[time-nuts] Talking Clock

[Bob kb8tq]

Hi

Based on only dimly remembered conversations long long ago: 

Getting all the “message fragments” so they sound natural and not choppy is 
not quite as easy as it seems at first. It’s by not quite rocket science, but there 
is more fiddling involved than one might think. 

One “solution” is to use fewer fragments and record larger portions of the message. 
Back in the day, storage limited your ability to record every message “full up”.

Assuming you record the “at the stroke the time will be” only once, the rest is 
under 3 seconds of audio. At maybe 16 bits / 32K sps. (yes that’s overkill). this comes 
up just under 200 K bytes. Recording the full time message for every minute of the
day would be less than 270 megabytes. 

That’s a pretty small flash drive ….

Bob




> On Sep 30, 2019, at 4:00 PM, Neville Michie <namichie at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Here in Australia we are suffering the loss
> of one of the significant developments in accurate time keeping and dissemination.
> The talking clock, built in England, with sound tracks on rotating glass disks,
> has been on the Australian telephone system for more than half a century.
> The system was timed by quartz oscillators, synchronised to the local observatory time.
> Now in spite of the trivial cost of maintaining the system it has been removed by 
> the money-hungry telco which took over the government run telephone system. 
> Now it occurs to me that the sound tracks occupy a very small digital space, and 
> with modern flash drives and a little logic the talking clock could be driven by 
> any time nut's disciplined time source.
> So is there a time nut who could design a voice output that we could all use?
> 
> “At the third stroke the time will be…”
> 
> cheers, 
> Neville Michie
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