IBA Engineering Announcements - 15 May 1990 'R.D.S Information' 

Awesome !! Remember this one very well, need NICAM soon lol

I wish that the Engineering Announcements were around at the time of DAB being launched. They might have warned me that DAB was a technology created in the 80s and is a bit outdated and warn to wait for DAB+ with its better audio encoding. Especially that doesn't make that awful gargling sound in a poor reception area.

A week before my 17th birthday. Also, I have met the Duke of Kent. RDS is OK when implemented well, but can be a pain when implemented badly in the receiver. Eitshal is, I gather, supposed to be pronounced "Ayshal". Adrian is pretty good at Welsh place names, though.

From what I've seen, RDS is implemented beautifully in the UK, allowing seamless transitions from transmitter to transmitter as you drive across the country, but where I am in Australia it is woeful. Commercial radio stations misconfigure everything except the station name, with incorrectly set flags (especially traffic ones) and alternate frequencies set when there's only one station transmitter. In cases where there's more than one transmitter, you often find that the main transmitter has the alternate frequency set while the auxiliary transmitters don't, so if you kick into a fringe area and come back into the main transmitter area, you have to manually tune the radio again...and of course, the radio preset frequency also changes when this happens so it's a bloody hassle. If you've got a fairly modern car - especially a European one - car radios incessantly tune out from the station unless you disable RDS entirely. The national public broadcaster, the ABC (the only broadcaster with national FM radio networks - similar to BBC Radio 1-5) doesn't even use RDS on any of its non-city stations, and never uses alternate frequency flags, even though they would benefit the most out of their use.

The most useful invention ever for FM-DXing.