The ABC might have deemed the top of hour pips irrelevant in the digital age but in New Zealand, if the beloved bird call that precedes the 7 and 9am news on RNZ was removed, there would be an uproar. Or perhaps an up-squawk.
The many birds that have sounded out the top of the hour before the Morning Report mark their 50th anniversary this week. The concept’s beginnings were less auspicious.
In 1973 NZBC all night presenter Robert Taylor decided he wanted a sound to herald the start of his show and decided on the call of the Morepork or Ruru, similar in sound to the Australian Boobook.
As he wanted the sound immediately he decided to ask colleague John Winchcombe to do an impression of the bird in the hallway, which he duly recorded.
The ‘call’ gained in popularity until NZ Wildlife Service staff member John Kendrick called in about it.
Taylor told RNZ:
“He said to me, ‘what’s that strange Morepork call you’re broadcasting?’
I said ‘well, what do you mean strange?’
He said, ‘well, it’s a dialect I’ve never heard before,’ and I had to fess up and tell him that it was a fake that we had done because we couldn’t get hold of the real thing.
He said, ‘I’m in the Wildlife Service in Bowen State building. Come up and see me, I’ll sort you out’. I went over and I formed a lifelong friendship with John Kendrick, who was the sound recordist for all of our bird calls.”
The friendship would involve field trip adventures way out of his comfort zone for Taylor, April Fools Day pranks and poignant reminders of birds now extinct.
You can read, and hear more of RNZ’s radio bird calls above.
The reason why the ABC dropped the time pips are because except in Sydney they are not accurate for the following reasons:
In DAB+ digital radio there is a processing delay of around 4 seconds (https://radioinfo.com.au/news/digital-radio-delays-play-cricket/) and considering each pip is separated by 1 second it makes it useless.
In addition remote areas have their ABC radio added to the Viewer Accessed Satellite Television signal this takes 1/4 second to go up and down, excluding digital audio processing similar to the above
If listening is via the internet, the sound is sent in packets which do not have to travel by the same route. The packets are time stamped and reassembled at the far end. It has the greatest delay to prevent gaps in the sound or missing program.
Lastly communications between studio centres is done by digitised signals through fibre optic cables which are pretty long from Sydney to Darwin and Perth.
New Zealand is a small country in which the only digital radio is high frequency DRM radio broadcast to the South Pacific. The only one of the reasons above that apply is the internet.
I should add that New Zealand is not a geographically a large pair of islands like Australia!
Also the most accurate available time is to use a GPS receiver. The many GPS low orbiting satellites transmit their location and the universal co-ordinated time (was GMT prior to UTC). The receiver will calculate the delay from each satellite and work out the average time from at least 12 satellites.
This is more accurate than using phones or the internet time.