[time-nuts] Talking Clock

[Jim Palfreyman]

Hi All,

I have the Tasmanian unit of the German made TTL based speaking clock
running in my garage. I've kept it going since it was decommissioned in the
mid 2000s. In true Time-Nuts fashion I have it synchronised to the GPS.

For extra fun, I broadcast it on FM 107.7 using a (legal) low power
transmitter. This means people in my neighbourhood can still hear the just
shut-down Australian speaking clock.

Jim


On Tue, 1 Oct 2019 at 18:00, Michael Wouters <michaeljwouters at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I designed the hardware and wrote the software for the now defunct
> Australian speaking clock.
> The prototype pieced together the audio from fragments and it did
> indeed take quite a bit of effort to get this to sound clean.
> Mismatches in sound levels at the boundaries caused 'pops', for
> example. I spent about a week with my headphones on.
>
> Cheers
> Michael
>
> On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 12:08 PM Bob kb8tq <kb8tq at n1k.org> wrote:
> >
> > 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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