Wednesday, November 03, 2010

New York VOLMET Will Return; CFH FAX May Not

A recent Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) states that the New York VOLMET transmission on 3485.0, 6604.0, 10051.0, and 13270.0 kHz is off-air for transmitter maintenance. It is scheduled to return in mid-November.

The current situation is unlike the previous outage in 2007-2008, when the station simply ran out of money and left the air for some long periods of time, with no public notice at all.

In September, a listener reported on the UDXF mailing list that he had copied a message announcing the impending termination of all HF radiofacsimile and radioteletype broadcasts from the Canadian Forces METOC Centre. These originated from CFH, Canadian Forces Halifax, in Nova Scotia, on the assigned carrier frequencies of 4271.0, 6496.4, 10536.0, and 13510.0 kHz.

Hours of listening here produced no confirmation that this message had been sent. In addition, endless Internet searches turned up absolutely nothing.

As of November, however, all four frequencies are silent. It is not known whether this is temporary or permanent.