OT; Now, over to our correspondent...

[Sam Plusnet]

I suppose Fred Bloggs had spent the afternoon in and around the court gathering facts and gossip which, after translation into journalese, he could then use in his report.

[Sam Plusnet]

Or because the interview isn't (quite) live & the delays have been edited out. I bet it's possible to automate most of that process so it can be done very quickly.

[Etaoin Shrdlu]

There was a great series called Broken News that took the micturition out of newscasting pretty nicely. Plenty of clips on youtube, if anyone's interested.

[Johnny B Good]

Yes, but you're going to hang up before she gets a chance to accidentally answer it on purpose, aren't you? :-)

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Far too subtle for the likes of bert to understand. He reads the Mail, you know.

[Johnny B Good]

That seems to me to lack the all important phrase, "all too" in there.:-)

[Johnny B Good]

Typically, over unloaded lines, about 20 to 30 percent slower, afaicr.

ISTR a propagation delay time of 70ms being mentioned in this context (BICBW). Since sound waves in air travel at about 330m/s or 1100 feet/s you'd need to be about 64 feet away from the speakers to double up on this delay. A more typical 10 foot separation only adds another 9ms delay to the analogue broadcast propagation delay, whatever that might actually be.

A quick 'n dirty calculation (1 foot per nanosecond light speed in air) for a 100 mile cable route with 70% velocity factor suggests my initial

70ms is off by a good two orders of magnitude. I got a delay value of 0.7392ms (which excludes the Tx to Rx path delay).

[Mike Clarke]

ISTR a programme on the radio a while ago describing a more low tech approach where one of their correspondents in America arranged for the presenter in the UK studio to include a precise number seconds of "waffle" at the end of each question. He would then start his answer at the end of the question so that his reply appeared to arrive immediately the other person stopped talking,

[Chris J Dixon]

Almost a Two Ronnies sketch. ;-)

A recent podcast of IIRC Inside Science included mention of what they called a "simrec". They had interviewed someone in the US over a poor quality phone line. The US end was recorded on a mobile phone, and the resultant MP4 file emailed to the programme makers, who edited it in for broadcast.

Chris

[Martin Brown]

Going up to a satellite and back plus the various encoding overheads.

The DAB delay is typically 1-2 seconds although it is chipset dependent so if you have more than one DAB radio on you get flanging effects where you can hear both at once. The time pips on DAB are a couple of seconds late which makes them pointless and highly misleading.

BTW Did anyone else hear the digital radio sycophants on Today this morning claiming that we were all ready for digital switchoff!

They seem to live in a strange alternative universe where battery life in a digital radio is comparable to that in an FM radio.

Roberts claim 120h in their DAB/FM models with 6D cells. A basic FM/MW/LW transistor radio will do twice that with a pair of AA cells.

I suspect they compared digital tuner only models or something.

[tony sayer]

The delay I alluded to was the time we altered some processor settings in the studio racks room till it came up on the monitoring radio!....

Yes there always prophetising on the coming of the digital messiah;!...

;!(..

They made it up more like to suit their message..

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Wonder what you're doing where 2 seconds is critical?

A mains locked clock is likely to be more than 2 seconds out at some point in the day.

[Martin Brown]

Astronomy for instance. Occulation timing aims to be better than 0.1s if done by humans or 20ms by CCD is used to study the edge of the moon.

That is why quartz clocks and sometimes ovened crystals are used where real precision and stability is needed.

The low frequency long baseline interferometry group went as far as discipling a local rubidium standard from MSF Rubgy in the early 1980s. They could detect dew on the ground at Rubgy since the 60kHz pips were observed to be systematically late in the early morning.

[Huge]

[Huge]

[Nothing]

Sorry, finger trouble.

[tony sayer]

Are you saying that the morning dew delayed the radio wave proprogation?...

Which I suppose it might at LF?...

>

[Johnny B Good]

Yes, but not compared to other mains synced clocks. :-)

Istr, that such mains synced clocks could vary from real time by as much as give or take a minute (or even more) although they tended to be within a second of real time each and every midnight for years at a time, barring any mains outages of course.

[DJC]

If you wanted precision surely you could use a GPS signal?

[Martin Brown]

I can't remember the details now (~1980's). I think it might have been that the damp ground presented a more effective ground plane as well.

I slightly misremembered in that they used Loran-C 100kHz as well.

If you are interested a description of the original kit although not the systematic error I referred to above is online at :

[Dave Plowman (News)]

And you use the GTS from DAB for this?

Domestically, most would simply use a radio controlled clock these days. Which you never need to alter.