The RDS Forum is the international platform for advances in RDS technology – The next meeting of the RDS Forum is on 11/12 June 2012

Find us onFacebook LogoTwitter Logo

Nowadays RDS is really very widely used

The RDS Forum is a non-profit international professional industry association that has the objective to promote and maintain the RDS technology, which was developed by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in the early eighties as an open system to enhance FM broadcasting, primarily to enable automated tuning in mobile FM radio receivers equipped with that then new technology.

Nowadays in 2011, over 25 years later after that technology was created, almost all FM radios in Europe and the USA use RDS. ICs have become available that have an FM receiver and an RDS decoder on the same chip and the price for such a chip, if bought in quantities, is now extremely low, say to give the magnitude, only one to three Euro. The trend of this price is still falling and the quantity of such chips sold on the world market is still much increasing, now already over 600 million units per year. In comparison, the size of the world radio market is just over one billion radio receivers sold each year.

FM/RDS radio is increasingly used in portable devices

Many applications are nowadays within mobile phones and portable devices. The more traditional car radios have sometimes a separate RDS decoder IC, but RDS decoding is also very often an integral part of dedicated multi-purpose DSP’s, necessary for the product even without RDS. In these products the RDS function price is then almost zero, as it is done by software only. The performance of an FM/RDS car radio in difficult receiving conditions, like in mountainous regions, where signal reflections and multipath signal propagation are frequent, depends very much on the car radio and antenna design. If very well equipped with multiple tuners and antenna diversity, such an FM car radio can even out-perform a DAB radio. The least is to say that there is no difference then in reception quality.

This kind of performance was only achieved with technology developed in the nineties and if that fact would have been known by the DAB developers, they would probably not have dared to start their project Eureka 147 in the eighties, as in their mind was to achieve with DAB an audio quality in car reception so crystal clear like on CD. Now we realise that FM is even better than CD and that the DAB argument that it can out-perform FM with better audio has in the meantime totally lost its value. Nevertheless, digital radio is coming as many broadcasters want to use the multimedia options, even if there are tremendous investments then required to build the DAB transmission network, but the economic crisis now slows down everything anyway.

RDS helped FM broadcasting to be a really successful technology

It was actually RDS that made FM broadcasting very successful and extremely widespread. The RDS technology can be seen as a 'silent revolution' within FM broadcasting, nowadays very difficult to replace by digital radio, as RDS made FM so convenient to be used. The RDS technology will most probably live as long as FM broadcasting, which will most likely end as the last analogue broadcasting technology and of which a likely switch-off is impossible to predict at this time, given the fact that still almost all cars have not yet a digital radio and the main radio reception mode there is indeed FM/RDS. The life-time of a car is nowadays 10 to 15 years. In many new cars the radio is not only an integral part of the dashboard and but also an integral part of a complete infotainment system. An upgrade to digital radio reception in those cars is thus impossible, or if possible, then extremely expensive, because of the labour needed to achieve a good result. Therefore FM broadcasting will still be there in 2020 and even later. Any earlier switch-off is just not possible.

Digital Radio progresses only slowly – but then RDS can well support the transition

The RDS Forum is pro digital radio, even if it maintains FM/RDS. It believes that the transition to digital radio cannot be avoided, even if it will take at least another 10 years to achieve this. Such a long transition makes it very complex for modern car radios to achieve radio service following when the drive is over a large distance and includes neighbouring countries, where the development status of the digital radio network is not advanced. Frequent switching between FM and DAB/DMB is then needed, in both directions, and without user intervention hopefully. Not to annoy the end user, broadcasters will have increasingly to use the data features that are common between RDS and DAB, and there are quite a few. If this is well done, the transition could be smooth and the RDS Forum has started just now to study all the issues that will facilitate the transition to digital radio then and create corresponding guidelines for the broadcasters and the receiver manufacturers to explain those important issues iin detail and encourage their implementation.

The RDS Forum is a superb contact network

The RDS Forum was founded in 1993 and it serves its members also as a contact network for experience exchange regarding the use and correct implementation of the technology. Maintenance means not only keeping the RDS system going as originally conceived by the EBU, but also upgrading it, maintaining full compatibility with the very large number of existing RDS receivers, to enable new functionalities that have only recently become available for implementation in new RDS receiver generations. RadioText Plus/RT+ which was jointly developed by Nokia, the ARD/WDR and the IRT is a good example for this. The public ARD radio stations in Germany have started to use RT+ in 2006 and ClearChannel Radio in the USA has introduced RT+ in 2008 on over 450 radio stations. When the iPod nano 5G was released in August 2009, it was then the first tiny portable FM/RDS radio with full RT and RT+ functionality.

RDS Forum members are many world-wide known companies that include:

2wcom Systems in Germany, WorldCast/Audemat and TDF in France, Autosound Electronic in Hong Kong, Robert Bosch Car Multimedia in Germany, Catena Radio Design in the Netherlands, the Swiss Private Radio Association, Data FM in the USA, Delphi Deutschland, Digita Oy in Finland, Harman Becker Automotive Systems in Germany, Hyundai Autonet Co. in Korea, the Institut für Rundfunktechnik in Germany, ItoM in the Netherlands, JVC KENWOOD Corp, LG Electronics in Korea, Mitsubishi Electric Automotive Europe, Nokia, OFCOM in the UK, Pioneer, International Datacast/Profline in the Netherlands, Qbit in Germany, Silicon Labs in the UK and the USA, Sony, Swiss Broadcasting Corp. (SRG/SSR), Swisscom Broadcast AG, TomTom International, Visteon Engineering Services in the UK, WiWi Industries in Hong Kong and Swedish Radio.