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RDS on LM Comm stations in Lex

Still surprised they haven't installed this on their stations by now. It's pretty standard for 2015 I thought.

It was on 106.3 for a month then it was gone 2 years ago.
 
You'd think it would be standard but it seems it isn't, at least not yet. Here in Louisville, three of the Alpha Media stations don't have it (WXMA, WMJM, and WGHL). Oddly enough, the other two Alpha stations (WDJX and WGZB) do have RDS and have both had it for over a decade, although they don't really use it for anything other than to identify the station.
 
sdskees said:
You'd think it would be standard but it seems it isn't, at least not yet. Here in Louisville, three of the Alpha Media stations don't have it (WXMA, WMJM, and WGHL). Oddly enough, the other two Alpha stations (WDJX and WGZB) do have RDS and have both had it for over a decade, although they don't really use it for anything other than to identify the station.
Click to expand...

A basic RDS encoder is $300, but all that gets you is an 8 character name. You can say "997 DJX" "99.7 DJX" or 997 WDJX" ---but you can't say "99.7 WDJX" because that would be 9 characters counting the space and the decimal point.

To do song titles and artists most stations stream their data offsite so it gets formatted into readable blocks. It then gets back to the station via an internet connection. And you need a fancier RDS box. Most stations use an Audemat FMB-80, which costs about $2K. Then there's the offsite company that must cost money or barter spots or something.

It ends up being an expense, and apparently Alpha and L&M don't want to spend it.
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I see. That makes sense. If I recall the 106.3 had song titles but guess they thought it wasn't worth it.
 
Yeah, it's unfortunate for sure. It's nice to be able to see the song title/artist if you are curious about it, so it can be VERY helpful in that way. I see that WSTV (Star 103-7) out of Frankfort has stopped displaying song title/artist info on their RDS stream. All it normally displays now is something about finding them on Twitter, or something along those lines. It's disappointing indeed, because I enjoy listening to that station and found the artist/song title info helpful with many songs they play.
 
KYradioJake said:
Yeah, it's unfortunate for sure. It's nice to be able to see the song title/artist if you are curious about it, so it can be VERY helpful in that way. I see that WSTV (Star 103-7) out of Frankfort has stopped displaying song title/artist info on their RDS stream. All it normally displays now is something about finding them on Twitter, or something along those lines. It's disappointing indeed, because I enjoy listening to that station and found the artist/song title info helpful with many songs they play.
Click to expand...

This wasn't by design. Our FMB80 locked up and we've been troubleshooting the problem. Hoping to have it back soon.
 
Yeah, I noticed a couple weeks ago as well. Hopefully the fine folks over at LM are working on getting the other FMs in their cluster up to par with RDS as well. Time will tell, I suppose. One other station that I'm VERY surprised has not started using RDS is WEKU 88.9 out of Richmond. I thought it was pretty much a given for public radio stations to have it! :p
 
Hopefully it will be on the others soon. Seems like the audio has been better sounding on 96.9 and 92.1 lately.

Yeah I am surprised about the WEKU not having RDS. 107.1 and 89.9 does in town.
 
Yeah, I saw that. Surely they wouldn't have abandoned it this soon after getting it up and running? But then again...they did abandon it on 106.3 after they tried it on that station for a couple months. Who knows. Hopefully it's just a technical issue that they have to work out.
 
KYradioJake said:
Yeah, I saw that. Surely they wouldn't have abandoned it this soon after getting it up and running? But then again...they did abandon it on 106.3 after they tried it on that station for a couple months. Who knows. Hopefully it's just a technical issue that they have to work out.
Click to expand...

I did tweet them about it and was told this... We had an equipment malfunction last week when we lost power. Working on getting it running again. Thanks!
 
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