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🦫 Do you ever get that gnawing feeling?

https://yukonstruct.com/hall-of-innovators/

My 2025 nomination for Hall of Innovators is Tagish Radio Rob!

Rob has no idea I’m nominating him and he’s never seen the piece below I wrote this morning for him. While we are lightly friends and worked together on a couple small jobs in early 2000s, we haven’t seen each other face to face in several years. I’m just a fan. No discussion of Yukon innovators is complete which doesn’t include him and his multifaceted work. Matt Wilkie

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Born from a need to communicate from his home in Tagish 120 kms outside of Whitehorse and which did not have phone service, in the early 1990s Rob Hopkins, with a grade 8 education and little to no technical background, taught himself how to aquire and use full duplex radio recycled from a lighthouse, connect it with the telco, and send a fax to a friend overseas in Thailand.

Also wanting to communicate without driving into town other folks kept asking Rob to help them. Eventually this led to him building a large area wireless broadband link connecting Tagish and Marsh Lake with multiple hops and mountain top sites to Whitehorse and the world.

Being fascinated with radio content as well as infrastructure, in 1997 Rob started broadcasting music over the air from a small 5 watt FM transmitter – underregulated, a.k.a. pirate radio – from a radio tower erected in his yard, scavenged from the dump. By various negotiations and finagling and do-it-then-ask-forgiveness he got an antenna up on Northwestel’s radio tower in Tagish as a legit operation (CFET 106.7), and then eventually in Whitehorse as CJUC 92.5 – The Juice.

A natural outgrowth of Rob’s activities and interest became how to send out emergency and public service messages in underserved areas. Yukon hinterland is one thing, but why not also rural Africa and Asia? This idea “Radio Station in a Box” eventually manifested the open source hard- and software project Open Broadcaster, which has been in operation since 2002.

Tagish Radio Rob is a person who has most certainly cut his own trail through life and achieved supposedly impossible things. A true Yukon innovator, we’re lucky to have him manifestly exemplifying the art of the possible, right here in our Yukon backyard.

https://www.cbc.ca/live-radio/yukon-morning/the-founder-tagish-radio-getting-special-nod-yukonstruct

Emergency Alerts Accessibility Study: Making Alerts Better for Everyone

Neil Squire Society—a non-profit dedicated to helping people with disabilities regain independence—is making waves in accessibility innovation. Through their research and development department, they’re working on ideas to improve emergency alerts for everyone, not just those with disabilities.

Some of their exciting recommendations include:

  • Different alert sounds for different emergencies

  • Clear emergency types and timestamps in alert titles

  • Large, bold, high-contrast text and varied background colours

  • Visuals: images, emergency-type icons, shapes to indicate severity

  • QR codes for quick info access

  • Enhanced text-to-speech and synced text highlighting

  • Paragraph splits for readability

  • Multi-line text crawlers

  • Remote-controlled pagination for set-top box alerts

  • A centralized, bilingual (English & French) web platform for alerts

These findings will help shape upcoming Canadian accessibility standards, update the national guidelines for emergency alerts, and refine the Canadian Common Alerting Protocol profile.

Learn more: Accessible Emergency Alerts Survey Results & Report

Tech Tip: Smoother Audio Transitions

You asked, we listened! One of our most popular feature requests—fading out audio at the top of the hour when a show changes—has now been implemented. Enjoy seamless transitions between your favorite programs. See the new feature (GitHub PR 134)

Pipes and Gstreamer Sink Visualization

Sendai Framework Funding

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015–2030) is an international agreement adopted by UN member states to reduce disaster risks and losses in lives, livelihoods, and health, by guiding countries and communities to better understand, manage, and invest in disaster risk reduction and resilience, especially as climate change increases disaster threats.

What is the Sendai Framework?

2025 Sasakawa Awards for Disaster Risk Reduction

The 8th Session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (GP2025) Geneva, Switzerland | 2–6 June 2025

The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has announced I am on the shortlist for the prestigious Sasakawa Awards, recognizing outstanding contributions to disaster risk reduction worldwide.

Read more and see the candidates

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