[Swprograms] Fwd: [uk-radio-listeners] Digital radio won't give you the pip(s)

["Richard Cuff" <rdcuff@xxxxxxxxx>]

Worth a chuckle...the same logic applies, obviously, to audio streaming...

Richard Cuff / Allentown, PA  USA

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Martin Rosen <martin@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sep 30, 2007 5:35 AM
Subject: [uk-radio-listeners] Digital radio won't give you the pip(s)
To: uk-radio-listeners@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


In these days when tv stations are being accused of fixing phone-ins
etc.  Did  you realise the so-called GMT pips have been faked since 1990.


By Juliette Garside   Telegraph.co.uk


It is the sound by which generations of radio listeners have set their
watches but now the traditional BBC pips, marking the end of each hour,
are to fall out of time.

Technological progress is to blame. The pips, originally generated from
a clock at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, will no longer be
accurate because the hi-tech digital broadcasting system being adopted
in Britain has a time lag.

Sound takes two seconds longer to reach a digital radio than a
traditional analogue set. The delay is caused by the time it takes to
encode the signal before transmission, but also by the time each radio
takes to decode the signal.

Only about one in five UK households has a digital radio set but the
process of switching off the analogue TV signal begins in two weeks and
radio is expected to follow suit. Networks have yet to work out how to
broadcast the correct time on digital. Transmitting the pips two seconds
early would require a certain amount of creative licence, while the time
lag varies between radio sets, with some picking up the signal only 1.5
seconds late.

The pips, broadcast since 1924, helped to spread the use of Greenwich
Mean Time around the world. They feature on both Radio 4 and the World
Service. The Greenwich pips have, however, been "faked" since 1990. When
the Royal Observatory relocated from Sussex to the Canary Islands, the
BBC made its own pips based on an atomic clock at Broadcasting House.


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-- 
Richard Cuff / Allentown, PA  USA

International broadcasting / shortwave blog:
http://www.intlradio.blogspot.com
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