The RDS Forum is a non-profit international professional industry association that promotes and maintains RDS technology.
RDS was developed by the European Broadcasting Union in the early eighties as an open system to enhance FM broadcasting, primarily to enable automated tuning in mobile FM radio receivers equipped with the then-new technology.
Nowadays in 2026, more than 40 years later, almost all FM radios in Europe and the USA use RDS. Integrated circuits are available that combine an FM receiver and an RDS decoder on the same chip. When bought in quantity, such a chip is now extremely low cost, roughly one Euro as an order-of-magnitude figure. The price trend is still falling, while the quantity of such chips sold worldwide is still increasing.
FM/RDS radio is increasingly used in portable devices
Many applications are now within portable devices. More traditional car radios no longer have a separate RDS decoder IC. RDS decoding is now an integral part of the dedicated multi-purpose DSP already needed for the product, even without RDS. In these products the price of the RDS function is then almost zero, as it is done by software only.
The performance of an FM/RDS car radio in difficult receiving conditions, such as mountainous regions where signal reflections and multipath propagation are frequent, depends very much on the car radio and antenna design. If it is well equipped with multiple tuners and antenna diversity, such an FM car radio need not perform worse than a digital radio receiver such as DAB. At minimum, there is little difference in reception quality, and the audio reproduced by FM radio is generally superior.
The DAB argument that it can outperform FM with better audio has in the meantime lost much of its value. Nevertheless, digital radio is progressing, as many broadcasters and the car industry want to use more multimedia options, increasingly including hybrid radio and audio streaming as the Internet-connected car becomes a reality. In this context, automatic service following between FM radio, digital radio, and Internet radio is also an objective to which the RDS Forum has contributed.
Since 2018, the worldwide RDS standard IEC 62106 has been enhanced with three additional subcarriers. Their use with existing receivers is backwards compatible, so the basic RDS features continue to be received undisturbed by this innovation.
In December 2018, Radio France demonstrated the implementation of the new RDS2 File Transfer specification, RFT, in Nantes. They used the first commercially available RDS2 encoder from WorldCast Systems in Bordeaux and a newly developed RDS2 home receiver prototype made for Radio France. The demonstration showed transmission of music cover art and station logos using file sizes of up to 20 KB. The time needed to receive the files was about twice as long as with DAB, but still acceptable for enhancing the FM listening experience.
The next development step was to synchronize the cover art with the music items on air. This was achieved in 2019 and is now standardized as Slideshow by the IEC in Part 6 of IEC 62106.
RDS helped FM broadcasting to be a really successful technology
It was RDS that made FM broadcasting very successful and extremely widespread. RDS can be seen as a silent revolution within FM broadcasting. The technology will therefore most probably live as long as FM broadcasting.
FM remains the last hybrid broadcasting technology, and a likely switch-off is impossible to predict at this time. Many cars still do not have digital radio, and the main radio reception mode is still FM/RDS. The lifetime of a car is now typically 10 to 15 years. In many new cars, the radio is not only an integral part of the dashboard but also an integral part of a complete infotainment system.
An upgrade to digital radio reception in those cars may be possible, depending on the model, but it is not yet very popular because of the technical difficulty and labour cost involved. Therefore, FM broadcasting will still be present in 2030 and later. Any earlier switch-off is not reasonable apart from cases already partially implemented in Norway and Switzerland.
Digital radio progresses only slowly, but RDS can support the transition
The RDS Forum is pro digital radio, even while it maintains FM/RDS. The Forum believes that the transition to digital radio cannot be avoided, even if it will take a very long time.
The long transition makes it complex for modern car radios to achieve radio service following when driving over long distances and through neighbouring countries where digital radio network development is not advanced. Frequent switching between FM and DAB may then be needed in both directions, without user intervention.
To avoid annoying the end user, broadcasters will increasingly need to use the data features common to RDS and digital radio. There are already several, many copied from RDS. If this is done well, the transition can be smooth. The RDS Forum has studied the issues that will facilitate the transition to digital radio and has created corresponding guidelines for broadcasters and receiver manufacturers to explain and encourage their implementation.
The RDS Forum is a superb contact network
For many years, the RDS Forum has offered the industry, broadcasters, transmission providers, and regulators a professional contact network. Today, RDS technology is being adapted to what mobile FM/RDS radio receivers need, such as linkage to the Internet.
Thanks to the high level of expertise of its members and cooperation with other fora, the Forum has built up extensive experience over the last decades.
Now the focus is on RDS2
Since 2015, the focus has been concentrated on RDS2, the innovative RDS enhancement developed by a number of RDS Forum members.
The priority was adaptation of the RDS standard, with the new version including RDS2 published in 2018, and UECP, the Universal Encoder Communication Protocol, standardized in IEC 62106-10 and published in 2022. The ITU Recommendation on RDS, Rec. ITU-R BS.643-4 (2022), was also adapted to include the RDS2 option.