Non-Standard PS

The 10th RDS Forum (Berlin 4^th - 5^th December 1997) adopted a motion against non-standard usage of Programme Service name (PS) - Letter to be sent to regulators requesting full endorsement of the standard

The Problem:

Quickly received PS - of only 8 characters, indicating the radio station being received is critical to overall RDS usability.
This PS can be held in receiver memory for even quicker recall upon selection of a preset.
The use of PS, dynamically, will delay display of the actual radio station name with other extraneous information, which may be saved in the receiver memory, causing significant confusion to the user at a later stage when returning to a particular preset.
Safety issue for car radios, which should not have rapidly changing displays; the transmission of PS, dynamically, causes rapidly changing displays that are clearly potentially distracting to a driver.

The Letter:

The RDS Forum adopted the content of a letter which the European Broadcasting Union was asked to send to regulators in those European countries where the RDS standard EN 50067 applies, but is not respected, at least by some broadcasters, to the end that they abuse the PS feature to convey text messages instead of giving their Programme Service name as implied by the standard.

Click here to download the letter in PDF format (16 kB).

The Support documentation:

Click here to download Relevant extracts from the new version of the RDS standard. A document in PDF format (16 kB)

Click here to download Relevant extract from the new RDS Implementation Guidelines. A document in PDF format (21 kB)