Saw the Alternate Frequency part of RDS in action last week - was driving between the Gold Coast and Brisbane listening to Rebel FM, and the car stereo was bouncing between the 99.4 and 90.5 transmitters for part of the journey. There was about a 5 second delay between the two services, which made it near unlistenable for a few minutes before it sorted itself out and finally locked onto just the one frequency.
Seems odd on the particular stereo just how sensitive it was to making the swap - seemingly the moment it wasnât the best signal, it flipped, rather than waiting until it got below a certain level of signal?
The delay between those two Rebel services has been in effect for the past few months seemingly since they had those TX uplink issues that saw them off the air for a day or so. Presumably the 90.5 site is now fed differently as it is about ~5 seconds behind 99.4. Itâs really something that needs to be addressed, especially with the AF feature working very poorly as a result
I think youâre getting them confused with the âbig islandâ to the south. Queenslanders have normal crania- itâs true- itâs just that thereâs nothing in them (rebuttal: Kyle lives south of Point Danger).
Onto more serious matters- has anyone come across an LPON station with RDS? My mate at Cooma used to run the LPON âGT FMâ at Bombala; there was RDS on it during his tenure but Iâm not sure if they still have it on.
Wondering if anybody in the group knows of any stations transmitting RDS+ data (ie, specific tagging data of title and artist)
I know of a few around Sydney: mainly 2Day and 2MMM (from time to time), Hope 103.2 and Star 104.5. Nova and Smooth have in the past, but that seems to have stopped.
I listen to a lot of radio on my iPod Nano that supports iTunes tagging, and the general RDS+ experience on these stations is great, but Iâm curious to know what others around the country are using it.
I ran it on 4TO a couple of years ago, but we changed the software we were using for sending data to the RDS encoder, and it wasnât built into the new software.
While nice to have, I donât think there are many people listening on iPod Nanoâs to warrant getting it going again.
Star 104.5âs RDS has disappeared completely ⌠hope theyâre not experiencing the same type of issues that SEA and 2GO had, which saw the latter without any RDS for nearly 3 months only recently.