About the RDS Forum

About the RDS Forum

The RDS Forum is a non-profit international professional industry association that has as an 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 FM radio receivers equipped with that then new technology.

Nowadays in 2009, 25 years later after that technology was created, almost all FM radios in Europe 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 200 million units per year already. In comparison, the size of the world radio market is just over one billion radio receivers sold each year.

Many applications are nowadays already within mobile phones and portable network 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.

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 of which a likely switch-off is impossible to predict at this time, given the fact that at this time almost all cars have not yet a digital radio and the main radio reception mode is still FM, supported by RDS. The life-time of a car is nowadays 10 to 15 years. in many new cars the radio is an integral part of the dashboard and a complete infotainment system. An upgrade to digital radio reception in those cars is thus impossible. Therefore FM broadcasting will still be there in 2020 and even later. Any earlier switch-off is just not possible.

The RDS Forum was founded in 1992 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 exist 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+ and ClearChannel Radio in the USA has introduced RT+ in 2008 on over 450 radio stations.

RDS Forum members are many world-wide known companies that include
2wcom in Germany, Audemat-Aztec in France, Autosound Electronic in Hong Kong, Robert Bosch Car Multimedia in Germany, Catena Radio Design in the Netherlands, the Swiss Private Radio Association, Clarion Europe, the Denon Brand Company in Japan, Data FM in the USA, Delphi Delco Electronics Europe, Digita Oy in Finland, Harman Becker Automotive Systems in Germany, Hyundai Autonet Co. in Korea, Institut für Rundfunktechnik in Germany, ItoM in the Netherlands, J+K Technology Centre Europe for JVC and Kenwood, KRS Electronics Co. in Korea, LG Electronics in Korea, MC&T Electronics in Korea, Media Broadcast in Germany, Mitsubishi Electric Automotive Europe, Nokia, OFCOM in the UK, Pioneer, Profline in the Netherlands, Qbit in Germany, Ruoss AG in Switzerland, Silicon Labs in the UK, Sony, Swiss Broadcasting Corp. (SRG/SSR), Swisscom Broadcast AG, TomTom International, Visteon Engineering Services in the UK and WiWi Industries in Hong Kong.