Bald Yak 18: Everything Everywhere All at Once?
About this episode
In this episode, Onno explores the Radio Data System (RDS) and its implications for Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology.
Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I was playing around with RDS, or Radio Data System, it's a digital signal that's often embedded in a commercial broadcast FM transmission. Among other things it contains information about the station, its content, frequencies and potentially other useful information, such as traffic alerts. If you recall I've been working on 50 things to do with a Software Defined Radio and decoding RDS is one of those things. The decoding effort aside, I imagined a screen where you could see the RDS information, in real-time, as it was being transmitted by all the local FM broadcast stations. You'd see what music each station was playing, what their local clock thought the time was, how much they transmit other data and what they might do for emergencies, like say a Tropical Cyclone heading this way. It occurred to me that this would be an example of a fundamental difference between a traditional radio and a Software Defined Radio or SDR. Specifically, we're taught that you tune a radio to a frequency, it demodulates or decodes what's there and plays the sound, or digital information, or whatever is being transmitted, on that frequency. If you want to…
Keywords
- radio
- broadcast
- decoding
- emergency alerts
More episodes of Foundations of Amateur Radio
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- Where is the spark .. gap?
- Bald Yak 17: Adventures in Radio Data Systems
- Bald Yak 16: How do you decode FM?
- One step forward ... three steps back.
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