Jacksonville's Free Time and Temperature Line Gets New Number After Bank Merger

Bruce Robertson has watched this happen in other cities. When a Time & Temperature line goes quiet, callers keep dialing the old number anyway, "sometimes for months and even years," unaware that the service has moved. Jacksonville's line is still alive. It just has a new number.

Residents who relied on the free service for the daily time and temperature should save 217-408-9123. That is the new number for Jacksonville's Time & Temperature service, now operating under RTI Media's "Weather Now" brand. To update a speed dial, stored contact, or printed number kept on a wall or in a phone book, replace whatever is saved with 217-408-9123; the service still provides current time, temperature, and forecast at no charge, around the clock.

The switch was triggered by the March 1, 2026, completion of Heartland Bank's $170.2 million acquisition of CNB Bank & Trust. CNB, founded in 1854 and the operator of a West Morton Avenue branch in Jacksonville since 1917, had long hosted the Time & Temperature service as a community offering. When CNB Bank Shares, Inc. merged into HBT Financial, Inc., the arrangement dissolved. "Heartland would not allow us to continue using the number residents have called for years," said Bruce Robertson, president of RTI Media, "so we made the decision to keep the service available with a new number."

Robertson, a former radio announcer who is also the recorded voice callers hear on the line, runs RTI Media from Sanford, North Carolina. The company has been in the telephony audio business for more than 32 years and has revived or maintained Time & Temperature services in Lincoln, Nebraska; Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, Florida; and Owensboro, Kentucky.

The Jacksonville line fielded approximately 5,000 calls per month, a volume that reflects how deeply the service is woven into daily routine for seniors, landline users, and businesses that keep the number on hand for quick reference. Those who prefer not to dial can get the same basic information from local radio stations or a mobile weather app. But Robertson's experience suggests the pull of a familiar phone number is hard to overstate: after RTI restored a dormant line in Lincoln, it received more than 52,000 calls in its first month. In at least one Florida market, a revived line drew 14,000 calls in a single week, largely from callers who had been dialing a disconnected number for months without realizing it was dead.

The Jacksonville line's history is long enough to carry similar weight. Many residents have held the old number in memory since childhood, or kept it posted on a refrigerator for a grandparent to call on a winter morning. That institutional memory, built over more than a century of CNB presence on West Morton Avenue, does not reset with a bank merger.

Time & Temperature lines have been disappearing for years as banks that funded them as goodwill gestures are absorbed into larger institutions; Frost Bank in San Antonio has maintained one for more than 80 years, an increasingly rare exception. The Heartland-CNB deal created a combined institution with roughly $6.9 billion in total assets and 86 branch locations across Illinois, eastern Iowa, and Missouri. The number to write down is 217-408-9123.