[time-nuts] VNG

[Jim Palfreyman]

Hi all,

For those of you mainly in Australia and New Zealand you may remember VNG -
the now long departed short wave Australian Time Signal service. These words
will be familiar:

"This is VNG, Lyndhurst, Victoria, Australia on 4.5, 7.5 or 12 MHz. VNG is a
standard frequency and time signal service of the Australian
Telecommunications Commission."

and in fact if it were going now would be saying:

"This is VNG, Lyndhurst, Victoria, Australia on 4.5, 7.5 or 12 MHz. A
standard frequency and time signal service of the Australian
Telecommunications Commission. Your attention please. In accordance with
international agreement the VNG time signals will be retarded by precisely 1
second on the 1st of January at zero hours Coordinated Universal Time."

Now to the good bit.

I have acquired a cassette tape of original recordings of these words that
was used at VNG. The quality is surprisingly good. It includes 8 items:

1) 13-Dec-1966 VNG maintenance announcement
2) VNG station identification announcement by Len Grice (above) that was
broadcast every 15 minutes
3) January leap second announcement (above)
4) July leap second announcement
5) 1987 closure announcement by an unknown female voice
6) Final shortwave transmission at 30-Sep-1987 of VNG ending in static
7) Full studio take of all Len Grice's announcements - including stuff ups
8) Radio Australia broadcast article on the closure of VNG dated 4-Oct-1987.
(Poor quality due to poor SW reception)

For safe keeping I have digitised all these using a BOSS Micro BR digital
recorder and they are stored safely off site.

For those of you who would like to listen to a bit of Australia's history,
send me an email and I'll send you a 721KB MP3 of number 2.

I'm sure it will generate a few fond memories. It sure did for me.

Regards,

Jim Palfreyman