PTY Display Terms In Various Languages

RDS Guidelines

The RDS Guidelines are available to RDS Forum Members only. They constitute a pool of knowledge that is worth the annual RDS Forum member fee several times.

Often standards documents can appear to be deceptively simple: perhaps stating that “this bit does this particular thing” and “that byte does that particular thing”. But their prescriptive nature belies much of the embedded subtlety intended by the original designers. The RDS standards IEC EN 62106:2000 and US RBDS standard are not exceptions.

Many standards - used in broadcasting - published over the last five years or so, have indeed been so complex that a need for an associated Guidelines document, published outside the normative standards framework has been seen to be necessary. Again RDS was no exception: in fact it was a leader; the EBU recognised the need in 1990 when it published Tech Doc 3260, Guidelines for the implementation of the RDS system.

The RDS Forum Guidelines are intended to add to the RDS knowledge base, following many years of implementation experience. The major part of these Guidelines has been written with complete ‘articles’ covering particular RDS features, with all their main aspects drawn together. Each article covers:

References;
Purpose / Background;
Broadcasting Conventions;
Broadcasting Hints and Remarks;
Reception Conventions;
Reception Hints and Remarks;
RDS / DAB Interoperability.

It is therefore to be hoped that the user of these Guidelines - whether concerned with broadcasting/transmission or receiver design - will find all the issues concerning a particular RDS feature then collected together in the one ‘article’.

Additionally, these Guidelines include some very interesting articles on broadcasters’ implementations, using the features in both a variety of ways, to satisfy their particular requirements. Furthermore, some conceptual models for receivers have been included, to help understand the often complex interaction of features in a consumer oriented product.

The RDS Guidelines have largely been prepared in parallel with the upgrading of the RDS standard from the 1990 and 1992 editions to the 1998 and 2000 editions. Several new backwards compatible features have been added and certain rationalisation has been undertaken to increase harmonisation with the US NRSC RBDS standard, which has also been updated.

These Guidelines do not replace the RDS standards but rather they are written to provide complementary information for the widest range of RDS practitioners. It is hoped that transmission and studio engineers, students, commercial and marketing personnel and programme managers, will all find something useful in these Guidelines.

The writing and editing of these Guidelines, begun in December 1994, was a major collaborative exercise for the EBU and the RDS Forum. Without both organisations full commitment, this work would not have been possible.

Members of the RDS Forum have contributed enormously to this work bringing exceptional experiences from all sectors interested in RDS, amounting to many tens of years of gathered knowledge. The RDS Forum’s Guidelines Working Group has carefully studied many comments and these have been incorporated as appropriate.

Here is a list of the articles contained in the Guidelines:

Glossary
Acronyms
Conversions
AF
CT
DI and PTYI
ECC
EON
EWS
IH
Language identification
Linkage information
MS
ODA
PI
PIN
PS
PTY
PTYN
Regionalisation
RP and EPP
RT
TDC
TMC
TP / TA
Appendix 5A: PTY examples
Appendix 5B: PTY Languages
Appendix 5C: EON example
Appendix 6.1: Worked Example: Local Broadcaster
Appendix 6.2: Worked Example: Large Network Broadcaster
Appendix 7.1: Conceptional design for a mobile RDS receiver
Appendix 7.2: Conceptional design for a non-mobile RDS receiver

Download the PDF file of the PS article as an example.