RDS (Radio Data System) Compatible FM Receivers

[fan-of-fans]

I enjoy having radios with RDS (Radio Data System) compatibility on the FM dial.

For some reason, this technology didn’t seem to catch on here in the United States as soon as it did in Europe and possibly other countries. And it seems to predominately be seen most often in vehicle stereo head units, rather than portable receivers.

My previous as well as current cars are RDS capable.

I do have two receivers that are also compatible here in the house, one is a Cambridge Soundworks CD clock radio unit, from which I got at Goodwill. This one has some quite deep speakers for its size, which is about that of a portable stereo receiver.

The other is a GE Spacemaker under cabinet radio and CD player.

Both that Cambridge unit and the head unit in my current car are also CD text capable, meaning they can show tag info on CDs that are enabled with CD text to show track titles, etc. Spme of my newer CDs do give this info for each track, others do not.

Most of the radio stations in my area on FM do use the RDS system mostly to its full potential, with a full song and artist listing on each song. However during syndicated shows, song info isn’t broadcast, but only whatever syndicated show is in such as “The John Tesh Radio Show” is all that will show during the duration of that program. One station also shows phone numbers or ad info during commercial breaks. A few stations only give their call letters or genre.

 

[novum]

RDS was developed though EBU (European Broadcasting Union) projects that kicked off in the 1970s. So it became a fairly standard feature of FM radio here certainly by the 1990s, mostly because it was (and still is) extremely useful for car radios.

If you’re listening to a large station or a national network, the AF feature automatically keeps you seamlessly on the same station as you’re driving across the country. European countries tend to have national public service and commercial broadcasters that have FM coverage right across the whole country, so RDS if very useful.

Also there are features for things like getting traffic updates from other stations, so anytime there’s a traffic report the radio will tune in.

You get a lot of radio text info like station name, what’s playing now - some stations send just the show name, others send the track currently playing, possibly thing a phone/text numbers for phone-in shows etc.

DAB and DAB+ Digital Audio Broadcasting took that a stage further - single frequency networks hosting large numbers of stations on multiplexes - so you can have national, local MUXes operated by different providers etc. It’s been successful in some of the larger markets like the U.K. and Germany, while its flopped in some smaller countries, as FM already had a lot of capacity and commercial stations didn’t buy into DAB to the same degree. There a lot of focus on smaller independent stations here and much less centralised networking of programming, so a lot of those didn’t want to have to rent space on DAB Muxes and clung into their own FM transmitters and in more recent years, the focus is on podcast and streaming.

 

[henene4]

Most radio stations in Germany have some tie back to some public broadcast conglomerate.
Many are a lot more commercial, but regardless, many can piggy back onto the DAB/DAB+ systems of their bigger brothers.

Radio Gong is a station local to my home city and fairly small, but still goes to DAB/DAB+.

I don't know the US situation, but going DAB+ or equivalent seems like the "smart" choice.
And if it is a stationary device anyway, going straight to an internet radio device wouldn't be a far jump.

Those ways of recieving the program offer all the features of RDS and much more.
And for emergency purposes, any device with RDS isn't really good anyway - for that the simpler the better, all that is about is run time on a single set of batteries.

 

[cfz2882]

I have a 1986 Blaupunkt car radio that has RDS.

 

[novum]

DAB was a total commercial failure here in Ireland. The main public service broadcaster, RTE launched a network and none of the commercial stations came on board.

It ended up just being a simulcast of RTE’s national FM services: Radio 1 (main public service radio) 2FM (commercial music driven), Lyric FM (classical and arts) and Radio na Gaeltachta (Irish language).
They added a bunch of extra digital stations, mostly just play list driven automated stuff, with the odd live programme here and there:: 2XM (alternative music), RTE Chill, RTE Gold, RTE Junior and Radio 1 Extra which was mostly just sports opt outs or documentaries.

Irish radio is probably more commercially centric than a lot of continental Europe. Even RTE Radio 1 has always run advertising and commercial sponsorship. It’s both publicly and commercially funded. However beyond RTE it’s either full commercial or at a very very level, community radio run by volunteers.

There are a number of national commercial FM stations: TodayFM, Newstalk and regional ones like iRadio, Spin etc and then a heap of very much local stations with rather loyal listenership. Dublin and Cork have more, but most are run on a county-by-county basis.

None of those seemed to feel any reason to jump into DAB. They mostly (especially the local stations) own their own broadcasting infrastructure and were very unwilling to rent space on multiplexes and didn’t have the scale to add loads of extra stations. So it just withered and died, with RTE not being able to justify the costs if it was generating no revenue. So the DAB network was shut down entirely and it doesn’t seem like anyone has any desire to take our out of mothballs and attempt to run any commercial multiplexes. They’re all just focused on online streaming and podcasts as their digital output.

 

[fan-of-fans]

We did have some of the traffic functionality on RDS here in the US, at least my previous car had a TRAF button that would tune to a station that broadcasted traffic updates, when pressed. Not sure on the one I have now.

Most of these RDS receivers I’ve seen, can also do a search by program type (pop, rock, jazz, news, sports, etc) if the station has the program type data broadcast, which I think at minimum, all FM stations do have, regardless of whether they give any song info or not.