In reply to:

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This is my first radio that decodes RDS so I have a few questions about how it works.

1. Is it only FM? I've not found an AM stations with it.
   
2. Why does it sometimes stay on and sometimes flash?
   
3. I've heard that if your radio supports this, it monitors all frequencys for it all the time so that reguardless of the station your listening to, if a traffic report is played, the tuner would play that and then go back to your music. Is this the way it works?
   
4. If I tune to one particular FM station where the RDS lits up, I get a clock in the lower right hand corner. After I get the clock, it stays on reguardless of which station I change to. Even if I switch to AM. It's there until I turn the radio off and then I have to go to that one station again to get it back. Why is this?
   
5. When I have the clock, why does the top dot in the colon flash?

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I don't have my tuner yet, but I've learnt a little about RDS:

1. RDS is broadcast on FM only. There's provision in the spec to define a version of RDS for AM, but it's never likely to happen.
   
2. Based on experience with other tuners, flashing generally indicates a weak RDS signal, usually while the tuner attempts to find the program on alternative frequencies (AF).
   
3. You get the effect of monitoring all frequencies, exactly as you describe. The way it works is that the radio stations cooperate (yes, really) and when one station is broadcasting traffic anouncements (TA) the other stations that send traffic programming (TP) tell the tuner which station to go to. When the station turns off the TA switch (supposed to be at the end of the announcements, but some are naughty and want you to listen to their adverts as well), the tuner goes back to what it was doing.

   This functionality is not in the empeg player yet, but promised for v2.0. Mine's not going into the car until that happens, because that's the one feature I can't live without - I do 8-12 hours on a Friday night reasonably often, and it's important to know which route to take.
   

4. I don't know about the empeg's clock display - I guess it doesn't display the clock until it has synchronised.
   
5. I guess the colon flashes because you can't hear it tick when you've got your music on loud. I don't know the empeg, but many consumer clocks flash the upper dot in the first half of the minute, and the lower one in the other half. Perhaps it's doing this?
   

And a question of my own:

How do you tell the empeg which time zone to use to convert UTC from RDS into local time? (RDS does use UTC, doesn't it?)

Somebody else will no doubt add in the empeg-specific bits for me...

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Toby Speight