The electro-mechanical-optical clock was made obsolete years ago and the voice is now generated electronically. I think the reason it's being closed down is that the PSTN is digital and so delays are unpredictable leading to possible errors in the time. According to a news item I saw the company that runs the clock and supplies the audio wants to keep it going but the national network supplier (Telstra) is determined to close it down because of "network incompatibility".
I made a talking clock with that format a few years ago. It is based on an AVR processor that uses the mains frequency as a reference. The voice is generated by an ancient speech synthesizer chip that sounds like Stephen Hawking and the time is simultaneously displayed on a VFD. A PIR detector switches off the outputs when there's no human around. It can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmg0YsHlB3g&t=3s It wouldn't be hard to use the same platform to translate the time from a GPS receiver into the spoken and visual word. Morris -----Original Message----- ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2019 08:00:25 +1000 From: Neville Michie <namic...@gmail.com> To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement <time-nuts@lists.febo.com> Cc: Neville Michie <namic...@gmail.com> Subject: [time-nuts] Talking Clock 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 _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@lists.febo.com To unsubscribe, go to http://lists.febo.com/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts_lists.febo.com and follow the instructions there.