Decisions from the 15th RDS Forum

Election of officers: It was the unanimous wish of the RDS Forum that Johnny Beerling, Dietmar Kopitz and Bev Marks should continue in their RDS Forum Management Team roles for a further three years.

RDS-TMC standards issues: Now more than one million RDS-TMC sets have been made already, the majority being navigational receivers. The initial ENV`s are now being replaced with EN ISO standards from CEN and not CENELEC as in the case of the RDS Standard, the reason simply being the fact that all ITS applications are being dealt with by CEN and ISO. The new draft ENs have come about from work in the TMC Forum "Standards Task Force", which was tasked with editing the earlier standards, but not making technology changes. They are already submitted to voting. The RDS Forum will feedback an official note to the CEN Secretariat regarding our comments on these proposed EN`s.

RDS-TMC: The Conditional Access evaluation process that the TMC Forum has agreed, needs to be monitored, since the affect upon RDS implementations could be significant. Dietmar Kopitz will write a letter to the TMC Forum at ERTICO nominating our experts, so that they are invited to the relevant meetings and are given the possibility to evaluate the proposals, even if they cannot attend the meetings.

RDS-EON: Grundig claims a license to be paid on the use of the three letters "EON" which they registered as their own trademark. After long discussions with Grundig, the RDS Forum 2000 agreed to launch a cancellation procedure against this registration, made under bad intentions. Grundig in the meantime left the RDS Forum, and proposed that each manufacturer should pay a € 53'000, plus VAT one-off fee to use the three letters on sets. It is now up to the court to decide whether Grundig can continue with their trademark license claim, or whether their claim should be cancelled.

RDS-EON: The BBC jointly holds two patents with Philips, Swedish Radio and Austrian Radio on EON. In about 1997 the BBC had faced a claim from a German manufacturers interest group in Germany in respect of RDS-EON. This group had attempted to achieve a cancellation of this patent. To defend its position, the BBC had incurred significant legal costs. This led to an awareness of the commercial potential of the patent, and the possibility of recovering these costs started to be considered within the BBC. In June 2001, Philips sent out a letter to all companies requesting € 10'000 up front with € 0.50 for every RDS-EON set made! We estimate this to be 25 to 50 million € in total. The RDS Forum disagrees strongly with these claims. Most disturbing is the unfairness created by the retrospective nature of the claim, as it is established in the RDS Forum that the BBC had told all manufacturers about 10 years ago, when EON was launched,, that this technology was free to be used and that the patents were only registered to protect the invention against claims from third parties.

ODA-AID Registrations: The updated the list of ODA-AID Registrations document R01/001_3 was agreed. This includes two assignments made to the TMC Forum. The first AID is a re-assignment of the AID standardised for RDS-TMC ALERT C to the TMC Forum, which is undertaking the role of a guardian of the RDS-TMC standards. This is thus only a formality matter that results in no change to what had previously existed. The second ODA-AID was assigned in response to a request made by the TMC Forum as a result of a much recent activity and it looks very sensible to allow pre-service testing and then full service implementation when a service provider is ready to start a service.

RDS Implementation Guidelines: All guidelines (except Slow Labelling and Radio Paging) were completed in Autumn 2000 and can all be found on the CD ROM issued at this meeting. Some of these articles will now be put into the public domain of the RDS Forum Web site. However, to encourage also new RDS Forum membership, it was agreed that the more complex articles will be made available only to RDS Forum members via a new password protected section of the RDS Forum Web site.

UECP: The job agreed at last year's RDS Forum was to update the actually valid Version 5.1 in the light of developments undertaken by an ARD group of RDS encoder specialists. The RDS Forum agreed that is important that no "single country " solution was to be sought and it must be universal. On the other hand, everything that was done up to this stage concerned only additional commands and compatibility with the previous Version 5.1 was still in place. It was agreed for the drafting group to meet again in Autumn 2001 with the task to bring this upgrading process of the UECP to a conclusion.

Non-Standard Use of RDS - Dynamic PS: Private broadcasters in Germany had been using scrolling PS for years now already and the German RDS Operators Group had without success tried to stop this non-standard use of RDS. Finally the German Federal Minister of Transport had announced that this was a dangerous practise that was causing distraction to drivers, and thus this bad practice must stop. Unfortunately the Minister had to resign for other reasons and the envisaged action did not happen yet. The result was that these private broadcast companies continued. But now ARD public broadcasters had also decided to do so, specifically to enable longer PS names of their stations! The ARD Radio Committee and Technical Committee gave them approval, and they announced their intention to go ahead with this non-standard implementation. In March 2001, the German Consumer Council intervened to stop scrolling PS, and on 16 March 2001 a second letter was sent to the new German Federal Minister of Transport who had not replied yet! The RDS Forum expressed serious concern about these unfortunate developments that undermine the RDS standard. If Germany loses control of this situation it will set a dangerous precedent for the remainder of Europe, just because of the impact that the size of the German market has! It was agreed to formulate a Statement from the RDS Forum to make its opposition to these developments more widely known. This will also be published on the Web site to create a greater awareness.

Non-Standard Use of RDS - French Situation: A two second delay when tuning to a different AF is caused by satellite relays and digital signal processing for distribution to transmitters being used outside Paris, whereas in Paris the transmitter used had a terrestrial feed which did not have the same delay. The problem concerns the networks of RTL, Europe and NRJ, but not Radio France. It was agreed that the RDS Forum office will write a letter to the potential problem creators to draw attention to their non-standard use of RDS. This will also be published on the Web site to create a greater awareness.