Radio Data System (RDS)

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 wasn’t the best signal, it flipped, rather than waiting until it got below a certain level of signal?

2 Likes

That’s odd about the delay. They were synced once upon a time.

In Canberra, Mix 106.3 and Hit 104.7 use AF.
In my Skoda Fabia I don’t notice the frequency change.

1 Like

Yes, if it’s well implemented, it should be seamless.
Like the Port Macquarie & Kempsey set up for HIT and Triple M.

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. It’s really something that needs to be addressed, especially with the AF feature working very poorly as a result

I think 99.4 is fed by some sort of radio link from the studio, while all other frequencies are satellite fed.

1 Like

Queenslanders and their quibbles. Be thankful you have Rebel at all!

I think they’re still dirty about getting thrashed in the first Origin game.
I guess it can’t be easy having two heads and all :laughing:

I think you’re getting them confused with the “big island” to the south. Queenslanders have normal crania- it’s true- it’s just that there’s 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 “GT FM” at Bombala; there was RDS on it during his tenure but I’m not sure if they still have it on.

1 Like

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 I’m 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 wasn’t built into the new software.

While nice to have, I don’t think there are many people listening on iPod Nano’s to warrant getting it going again.

Radiotext Plus used to also be used on 4MMM and possibly B105 but stopped over 12 months ago.

Id guess its something to do when they started scrolling the RT … seems I may of started a trend with that :smile:

C91.3 has modified their RDS again, this time being read as “C91.3-FM”, in which a dash was added into it. There is no RadioText available.

1 Like

I reckon it looks cleaner without the dash.

Only thing I can think of is whether spaces are causing issues with the hardware or software?

Perhops C91.3FM would be better?

That’s exactly what they used when they first introduced RDS back in February.

my guess would be they are trying different encoders

Nova FM and Smooth FM seem to be stuck.

Star 104.5’s RDS has disappeared completely … hope they’re 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.

I also noticed this today, although it looks like it’s back online now!

1 Like