22 ms·
The Bay foghorns are electronic tones; they don’t sound like classic/cartoon foghorns at all.
by closeparen 6y ago
The Bay foghorns are electronic tones; they don’t sound like classic/cartoon foghorns at all.
- stn8188 6y agoIf it's anything like the most common fog horn that the USCG uses across the country, it's a 273Hz tone (though I don't recall the waveform, most likely sinusoidal). As of 8 years ago, they were using the FA-232 model fog horn, the circuitry was designed in the '70s and uses discrete BJTs on the boards to generate the tone and drive the "speaker".
- johnfn 6y agoWow. I went online and found an audio recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=12&v=CPUs2KnAyhU&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=12&v=CPUs2KnAyhU... Yup, the tone at 0:08 is pretty much the exact tone I heard. Mind-blowing. Never would have imagined that's what a fog horn sounded like. I expected them to all be much deeper tones like the ones that come a few seconds later. I guess there must be weird acoustic qualities that make only the higher toned ones carry into Nob Hill.