Why dont radio stations use RDS enough?

Soldato
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I think RDS is the thing on a radio that produces the text on the display, is that right?

When i was working down london there was a few small pirate/small radio stations that used this system to a good extent, it displayed what was being played, what station it was, and what number to text / call them on.

Ive never seen this on any stations up my end whilst in car, and i dont see the big stations using it either. Seems like a missed oppurtunity to add a little bit more
 
Almost all stations use RDS - the station identifier, fewer use Radio Text (the much longer scrolling type text for current info)

This is mostly due to it being complicated to implement - you have to send data up to the transmitter as well as the audio (most pirate stations won't have much if any distance between the Tx and the studio) as well as it really, to be honest, a little used feature - distracting too, in the car.
 
Almost all stations use RDS - the station identifier, fewer use Radio Text (the much longer scrolling type text for current info)

This is mostly due to it being complicated to implement - you have to send data up to the transmitter as well as the audio (most pirate stations won't have much if any distance between the Tx and the studio) as well as it really, to be honest, a little used feature - distracting too, in the car.

I see what you mean, i suppose it might be a bit distracting, but i thought for times when the radio station is running a feature, and a text number is needed. then they could have it on people displays all the time so they dont miss out.

didnt realise it was a complicated thing to implement :)
 
I've seen the scrolling text used but only on the continent. Commercial radio in the Netherlands and Denmark used to scroll adverts across the display.
 
I saw the artist-song being displayed more commonly when I was living in Germany.

DAB has the ability to show it, among other station info, but still only some stations choose to do so
 
The station i used to run had it saying "Shock Radio live from the University of Salford" when i was there. We had the cabling running to the serial server in the studio so we could update it on the fly, but we never got round to writing somthing which would query the playout system for current playing track.

IIRC Radio 1 used to do this during the Top 40 on a sunday afternoon...this was a good number of years ago tho
 
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