By Peter Saxon
The first licensed station to go to air in Australia and reach its 100th birthday originally had the call sign 2SB. It later became 2BL and is now known as ABC Radio Sydney. The celebrations last Thursday, November 23, 2023 went from early morning to late into the night.
Of course, your humble correspondent, who rarely rises before the crack of noon, sent others more able to cope with the early hours than he. Their handiwork can be read here and here. You can listen to the whole morning’s show presented by Sarah Macdonald here. Sarah also features on my home video of the pips execution below.
No, I am far more suited to evening events where there’s a wider variety of refreshments than orange juice and coffee.
Apparently, King Charles III was unable to attend. One might be tempted to surmise he was somewhat distracted watching the latest episodes of The Crown. Nonetheless, His Majesty did find the time to scribble out a customary Royal note of congratulations afforded all Commonwealth subjects on becoming centenarians, including Australia’s dear old Aunty.
However, this particular “dear old Aunty” has no intention of falling off the perch any time soon according to the speakers that addressed the crowd. Among them were Ben Latimer (main pic) who has taken up the role of national content director for the ABC Radio capital city brand after many years at Nova.
Also on the podium was the founder of this masthead, Steve Ahern who is managing the Sydney station as well as acting in that role for the others in the major market network. In a bit of a surprise to the crowd gathered in the art gallery section of the State Library, the CEO of Commercial Radio and Audio, Ford Ennals was also invited to speak. Both he and Ahern spoke of the great collaboration between the public and commercial broadcasting sectors on matters that affect both, such as new technologies and emerging platforms as well as audience measurement.
In the end, they vowed to remain close. frenemies. Strong competition, after all, drives better content and innovation.
Mr Ennals, of course, cut his teeth working with both the BBC and the commercial sector to introduce digital radio into his native UK. Chatting with him after the ceremonies I asked him to draw a comparison between working with the BBC and the ABC. He told me that the BBC was more dominant in the market and could afford to attract the biggest stars.
A bittersweet moment came later in the evening when the pips were officially made redundant. No, not The Pips of Gladys Knight fame, but the Pips that lead up to the news on the hour. Yes, those high-pitched electronic chimes that are oddly reassuring as they countdown to the hour and the news theme, are now considered superfluous to Auntie’s needs.
Scattered among the crowd were some dozen “ABC Superfans” who, eschewing the million-dollar prize giveaways offered by some of the public broadcaster’s commercial counterparts, instead won their way through to a cocktail party where one of them was selected to pull the plug on the pips – so to speak – never to be heard again.
BTW: Don’t you just hate it when you’re standing with phone camera to eye, obviously filming an event when some inconsiderate ‘person’ saunters in front of you and blocks your shot?
The DAB+ versions of RN and Metropolitan (2BL 702) do not have time pips at the start of the hour. That's because of the delay between the analogue and DAB+ signals.
In fact the time pips, which were provided to radio stations by the Sydney Observatiry were ditched in 2013 for the 1300 timeslot on 2BL.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/column-8-20130206-2dyn6.html
Other stations have never had time pips from the beginning: 2WS, 2Day and MMM to name a few.
2SM ditched the time pips in the 1980s.
Anyway, the clear identifier for a top of the hour "signal" has been the news theme.
Today clocks are synchronised on the FM band via its RDS service or the DAB+ service.
True many FM radios don't have RDS facilities. But if your FM radio displays the callsign and/or scrolling text, the FM radio receiver has RDS and the clock is displaying the correct time.
Like mobile phones, the clocks on a DAB+ or RDS-enabled FM receiver automatically change for daylight saving.
2GB continues to transmit time pips on its DAB+ signal. But due to the delay of the DAB+ signal, the time changes before the time pips.
When time pips were the standard fare of a broadcast, time pips had a pip at 30s before the top of the hour, then 10s then the six pips at 5s to the hour.
Today, time pips are only six pips at 5s to the hour.
So are time pips necessary? ABC TV ditched the analogue clock in the 1980s. There is a clear identification of a change in the hour with a recognisable news jingle. Music stations never bothered with time pips.
Today, radios through RDS on FM and mobile phones automatically time.
If you don't have any of those devices, try your digital TV or PC.
If that is not available ask a friend.
Thank you
Anthony, no-one is an island, from super duper Strathfield South, in the land of the Wangal and Darug Peoples of the Eora Nation
Broadcasting in Australia started with Amplitude Modulation and the ABC Sydney still using it 100 years later. It was offered FM in the 1990s when TV started rolling out UHF (Channels 28 - 69) but turned it down at a time commercial broadcasters were paying multimillions for licences. Now they transmit their 12 program streams on a single DAB+ transmitter which is also carrying 6 SBS programs. Yet they promote streaming instead of DAB+ the least polluting of all broadcasting technologies including streaming.
For some stations the Pips were a very reassuring feature of their programming well into the 2000s, so much so that they attempted to recreate them digitally after the analog era was over. It's not that many years later now and I haven't heard those characteristic pips now for what seems like an eternity.