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RDS Suprise

I purchased this little generic chinese mp3 player with built in fm transmitter at a flea market last year for around $20. To my suprise today i fired it up while riding with a friend whose vehicle has a RDS equipped radio and it was streaming the file names over the RDS display. I always thought RDS was something complicated, especially to have song titles display. If its so simple to have RDS display why dont so many stations utilize it other than for call letters???
 
There's two major problems for radio stations not using RDS:
a) No data path from the studio to the TX site
b) Can be hard to make automation systems play nice with RDS data.

On the other hand, it is very simple to put out Calls / slogans on an RDS output.
 
Fieldtech1 said:
If its so simple to have RDS display why dont so many stations utilize it other than for call letters???

It's not usually plug&play, but nothing a capable engineer can't do...


Regards,
Goran Tomas
 
It's not usually plug&play

You got *that* right! After connecting 200+ RDS encoders, every installation (still) is different. But when it all finally falls in place, the display can be an information-rich thing of beauty.

Fun fact: at full blast, RDS can output around 40,000 8-character words per day, which is roughly 5000 8-word "sentences" a day. As a comparison, let's say you have a phenominal sales staff (that's another subject) that can sell 20 units an hour 24 hours a day. That's only 480 spots per day.

Paul E. Burt, Chief Engineer
Alert FM, an RDS-based alerting co.
 
Is RDS popular over in the US ? I always got the feeling that we in Europe did more with it but stand to be corrected. Our BBC stations make use of the EON feature so if you're driving listening to BBC Radio 2 (a national station), and BBC Essex (local) runs a travel bulletin then your radio will switch to the local station whilst the TA flag is active.
 
Charlie said:
Is RDS popular over in the US ?

It's probably still not as popular as in Europe, but it has become much more widely used in the last 5 years or so. In Boston, every major commercial, and most non commercial stations use it, most with song titles.
 
In our market, only Clear Channel and the non-comms fully utilize RDS. Citadel just has the station ID. Inner City used to do song titles, but now just has the static ID, the local gospel station doesn't use it at all and Double O apparently is transmitting the subcarrier, but only PTY. Strange. We were the first the market with song titles and slogan on the PS and RadioText.
 
That's interesting - we've got rules here about dynamic PS (distraction on a car radio), but some stations send RT for the song information. Whilst a fair amount of domestic "hi-fi" units have an RDS tuner, we've got DAB (a bit or a sore topic!) but RDS was sold as being the usual thing for travel news and for automatic re-tuning as you move between coverage areas. BBC Radio2+4 use the PTY quite a lot, but I really wonder how many people search for "LIGHT M" whilst driving ? ???
 
bradgoehl said:
Do you have a brand or model number on that player?
No brand name but its has 'cmp-9000' on the face, so i assume thats the model number?? Its a unit that plugs diectly into your 12v cigarette outlet and has a USB host port for thumbdrives, a SD card slot, and a small lcd display. I will try to take and post a picture if anyone has an interest.

It sorta looks like this for reference,
http://69.36.72.119/pictures/010709/P1010118.JPG
 
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