[time-nuts] Talking Clock

[Michael Wouters]

Hello Dana

The prototype system I built used an E1 digital telephony card with 30
lines. I think it cost about $12000/year to lease the associated 2
megabits per second data capacity but we didn't do that; we just
commandeered a few lines from our site's capacity.
I believe the live system needed several hundred lines to deal with
peak demand, usually at DST transitions.

Cheers
Michael

On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 6:00 PM Dana Whitlow <k8yumdoober at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What kind of telephone service would one request for a talking clock, that
> permits a
> large number of users to be listening in at once?  I suspect that this
> would be the real
> difficulty and would incur considerable monthly expense.
>
> Dana
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 9:08 PM jimlux <jimlux at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> > On 9/30/19 3:00 PM, Neville Michie 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…”
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > using Bash on my mac:
> >
> > $ date +"The time is now, %H, %M, %S, coordinated universal time" | say
> > -v Karen
> >
> > I think that one could do a bit of scripting and have it have your
> > preferred wording, and synchronized to the top of the second.
> >
> > I leave it as an exercise for the reader to do it in French:
> > $ say -v Amelie "Le Temps Universel Coordonné"
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts at lists.febo.com
> > To unsubscribe, go to
> > http://lists.febo.com/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts_lists.febo.com
> > and follow the instructions there.
> >
> _______________________________________________
> time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts at lists.febo.com
> To unsubscribe, go to http://lists.febo.com/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts_lists.febo.com
> and follow the instructions there.