For some reason, I have always been facinated with Time and Temerpature services. When I was young and growing up in Wawina Minnesota, we did not have a time and temperature number. I would have to entertain myself by calling the operator and asking her what time it was. Ocasionally, I would visit my aunt who was living in the next town to the west, Warba Minnesota. This was a Continental territory and they had EAS to Grand Rapids, a Bell territory, where they had an Audichron STM very similar to the one that Alan David has.
Later in life, I found an Atis TTC machine that had been removed from service and arranged for the owner of it to sell it to Bob Riddell in Wawina, where it lives today.
This is a page that I have started to collect information about various time and temperature systems around the country.
From what I have been able to gather, there are a very limited number of players in the time and temp arena.
Audichron (now ETC) the orignal and probably most respected company.
Audichron's history was well documented by Alan David in an article in Switchers' Quarterly as well as another article in Singing Wires, both publications of Telephone Collectors International.
It seems that Audichron has historically leased their equipment to the telephone companies, which would sell advertising on the machines to local businesses. This practice seems to have ended in Bell territories after Divestiture.
ETC/Audichron still makes Time and Temperature machines which are all solid state now. I suspect that the majority of these are located at independants. I don't know if they are still in the habbit of leasing them or if they can be purchased by the customer.
WeatherFone sells a product they call WeatherFone® GPS WeatherFone's product seems to be a basic time and temperature machine using a local GPS receiver to keep it's clock synchronized.
WeatherFone also offers a add-on service where they will arrange to have a service remotely record the local forcast to be played to callers.
One of the things that impresses me the most about WeatherFone is they offer free commercial/advertisement recording service for the life of the product.
Weatherline WeatherLine is somewhat like the original Audichron business model. They simply offer a "service" which includes day, date, time and temperature, plus an updated weather forecast reported by a radio or TV station, or through a private meteorological service.
Viking Electronics Viking makes all sorts of add-on devices for the telephone industry. A few years ago, they came out with the "TNT", a small box that delivers basic time and temperature annoucements. It can be configured with a standard telephone line, or connected to an E&M type circuit and run like a drum annoucer in a central office. These little devices sell for between $250 and $500.
This is the only device I know of that is specifically designed to give the time with no ability to synchronize it to anything. The one in Washington Forest Minnesota seems to gain time pretty regularly.
WeatherChron I've been able to find very little about this company. They have a web page with a brochure from 1973 which gives some details about how their system works. There appears to be at least one of their machines in service today.
WeatherChron may have been the equipment that AT&T used up until September 2007 when they decided to end the last of it's time of day announcement services. An Article in the LA Times talks about this and does mention WeatherChron.
WIN-TNT This is a system which runs on a standard PC with Windows and Dialogic line cards.
And that brings up a good point. How hard would it be to build a time and temperature machine using a PC running Asterisk®? The answer is "pretty easy"! I won't get into the details of what Asterisk is and how it works, but it's basically a very customizable telephone system which runs on the Linux operating system. It supports both tradtional telephony interfaces as well as Voice over IP (VOIP).
One of the first things I did with Asterisk was exactly this. Build a number that plays the time and temperature. Where does it get the information?
The time comes from the built-in clock on they PC. This clock is kept synchronized with Network Time Protocol (NTP). The clock is kept accurate to less than a fraction of a second.
The temperature is aquired from a sensor outside of my house. It uses 1-wire sensor. I take a reading from it every 60 seconds to see if the temperature has changed and update a pointer that the systems references to play sound files, annoucing the temperature.
I recently spoke with a salesman who wanted to sell a new time and temperature machine to replace the one in Wawina. He claimed that Audichron had gone down the "PC" route at one time and pulled the product off the market because of the high rate of failure. I got the impression from him that it might have been related to a bad choice of hard disk drive model. You could easily use a solid-state drive to eliminate any moving parts.
In December 2008, I posted a message to the Singing Wires group asking for people to send me any numbers they knew of that are active time and temperature numbers or, for historical purposes, those that used to be in service.
The first step I have done is to compile a list of active numbers around the country. The List is now available for everyone to see. In addtion, you can Add a listing if it's not already in the list.