In reply to:

---

I'm wondering if the empeg is interpreting random noise as an RDS clock sometimes?

---

If it is, I'd call that a bug. If there's no clock info in the RDS stream, then the empeg ought to blank that area of the screen. If the clock data is inconsistent, it's probably just noise, and the same goes (e.g. if no clock data is received for a couple of minutes, or if wildly different times are received).