SOS Radio
Canadian anon here, our SOS/emergency/weather radio station is presently interrupted/down. Today December 19th between 4:30pm PT and now 8:00pm PT. Still down as I write this. This is very unusual. Since 4:30pm it broadcasts this loop message:
We are currently experiencing technical difficulties with our broadcast. We hope to have the system return to normal operation as soon as possible. We are sorry for the interruption.
This radio station is facing the largest Canadian military base & military airport on the west coast:
A first interesting "coincidence" is that at the exact same time the SOS radio went down, right after 4:30pm the sunset time, so right after it was dark, a unusual larger than usual amount of flights were sighted between the military base airport and civilian airport. Including both helicopters and planes. Lower than usual altitude. Much lower than usual. Windows are shaking. On their website there is no flights departure scheduled at this time.
Maybe they just have good faith "technical difficulties". Or maybe they need a temporary controlled & lawful black out on all communications to facilitate their operations.
What Is A SOS Radio?
Many people are scratching their heads here. For those not familiar with SOS Radio, it is also call a Weather radio. It is use in case of major catastrophe events, severe weather events, or when the infrastructure goes down, make emergency announcement. Rescue team, army, firefighter, medics, boats, often use it to communicate information to the public. Those SOS radios have multiple backups for redundancy. It is a first that a SOS radio is "interrupted".
Internet
A second interesting "coincidence", is the cable internet was down between December 19th, 4:30pm PT and 7:55pm PT. This is unusual. At 7:55pm is back to normal.
Guess where that cable internet goes through? Yes, the same military base. There have a data center there.
I'm posting this with one of my backup internet connections
Ping
A third interesting "coincidence", is that ALL internet ping fails. Including HTTP, HTTPS, IP, Domain Names, Tor Browser, etc. When pinging any, this suspicious and never seen before message is display:
Temporary failure in name resolution
Question
Anybody else has unusual outages? Radio, internet, mobile, electricity?
Update
My SOS radio is back now. Sunday December 20th, 2020 at 5:30pm PT. So it was down for 24 hours.
Their loop message stop. Now there are back to their normal broadcasting. Just normal stuff. No emergency. No unusual messages. So my guess is that it was just a coincidence of multiple unusual events all at the same time.
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[–] 26882884? 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
OK, if you're sure the frequency is 162.525 (not the more common 162.550, which is WX ch. 1 in US), then the station is CGX-451.
Found both entries for Texada Island weather -- note the latitude/longitudes a bit diferent, so guessing the station was moved at some point, and assigned different frequency:
162.525 CGX-451 BC TEXADA ISLAND EE/FF 49 41 51 -124 26 15
162.55 VBG-969 BC TEXADA ISLAND 49 41 47 -124 26 07
Oh -- is the station back on the air yet, or still silent?
Sauce: https://www.dxinfocentre.com/wx.htm
[–] 26888511? [S] ago
Yes the channel is 162.525. I actually see the antenna from my place. At the top of the highest elevation on the island north end. So I guess its new location is 49 41 47 -124 26 07. We'll go check it out during a future hike in the area.
Thanks for the call letters. I learned something new.
CGX-451is easy to remember. As it reminds me of one of my favorite book titled "Fahrenheit 451".Yup. My SOS radio is back now. Sunday December 20th, 2020 at 5:30pm PT. So it was down for 24 hours.
Their loop message stop. Now there are back to their normal broadcasting. Just normal stuff. No emergency. No unusual messages. So my guess is that it was just a coincidence of unusual events all at the same time.
[–] 26890252? ago
Glad to hear it’s back up. Anon above has good point that the audio may be fed to station over internet so an isp issue could account for the temporary outage.