Next RDS Forum meeting in October 2026 at Geneva

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In 2024 RDS has turned 40. The EBU published the first RDS specification in March 1984.

The RDS Forum was founded in 1993 and it serves its members as a contact network for experience exchange regarding the use and correct implementation of the technology. Since the year 1999 the RDS Forum maintains the RDS standards of the IEC and has a liaison status D with that organisation. Maintenance means not only keeping the RDS system going as originally conceived by the EBU, but also upgrading it and preserving full backwards compatibility with the very large number of existing RDS receivers, to enable new functionalities to become available for implementation in new RDS receiver generations. More

In 2025, over 40 years later, RDS and FM radio are a fully established radio technology, worldwide. Almost every person on earth has at least one FM radio, and a large proportion of those radios have RDS, in cars nearly 100% in Europe and the USA. We, in the RDS Forum, have successfully adapted RDS to meet the new requirements for mobile reception. RadioText Plus (RT+) was first discussed in the Forum in 2005. This very attractive feature certainly is also appealing to young people as it permits during a music radio programme (among many other possibilities) to display on the receiver the artist name and the music title. RDS2 with the Slideshow app can do better, but here we have achieved yet only the worldwide standard for it, having done some test and demos, but not yet achieved the implantation stage on which we are still working in order to make it easy for broadcasters to use this option, fully backwards compatible with existing receivers.

May be you find it interesting what we are doing and you consider to join the RDS Forum. Or, you are only curious in wanting to know how we work and progress.

In comparison to similar associations our RDS Forum annual member fee is relatively low. Your annual fee gives you the membership for the year from the moment you join. You can join the RDS Forum anytime. You register for the current year. The membership is automatically renewed each year. You can cancel or change whenever you want. More