I believe a couple of Australian cities are getting some real time traffic information via RDS. This is the mob that do it - I don't fully understand but they claim you buy an extra bit and it just "plugs in" to your existing system and they specifically mention some European car brands. Can't see how this can work. Re-reading through the website doesn't seem to have this - perhaps I misinterpreted it.

http://sunatraffic.com.au/consumer/index.html

There's no "subscription", just a once off purchase of a code it seems for the device. It's apparently encrypted somehow.

Now the frequency they list as transmitting the data is a regular radio station. When I set "TA On" in the radio menu, "TA" and "TP" light up when tuned to that station only. On other stations, the "TA" is simply "greyed out".

Should the empeg be displaying any info since it's showing the TA symbol? It's a bit hard to play with in the car where the only tuner I have is since I don't have easy access to the serial port without pulling the dash apart. Is there something in /proc I can access?

Unfortunately the BBS chokes when I try to search using RDS as the term.

hmm.. it sounds strang, in europe and most other parts i have heard of, live trafic data comes through TMC... Trafic Message Channel

In Denmark and for sure Germany thats a channel on it's own, most NAV units by them self tune for these channels and somehow select the best one, on some units you can select which one to use

cheers

bo

So it seems that Suna is just an TMC channel thats been encrypted

The piece of software you get is most likely just an decrypter..

No, the empeg should just behave like any other RDS radio

Regarding the TMC signal the empeg is deaf as it does not have the bits that makes it able to hear the data-stream

Any correct me if i'm wrong

small side note: in my part of the world the goverment system provides these TMC channels and they are FREE, it's a benefit for all parts, people can move faster, and if there are roadworks or something they don't have to battle so much with cars as they are auto send on another route

So how does "any other" RDS radio work normally? I understand it can also switch and cut in to the music for an announcement.

The TMC channel is a data stream though. Whether it can be used in any way may not be possible though with out tying it to a navigation system.

From what I can gather it's essentially gives co-ordinates and speeds and or events. The nav system then needs to figure things out itself in terms of what it does with the info.

As far as I know, TA stands for Traffic Announcement, indeed RDS based. E.g. in Germany and Holland this is frequently used. Example - If I'm listing to a CD and the radio receives a TA signal, it switches to radio mode (usually the hourly news update has finished and the traffic jams etc are listed) and stays tuned until the TA off signal is received.

TMC is a complete different setup - navigation equipment frequently uses TMC (either as addon or build-in). On my TomTom Go (with separate TMC receiver cable) displays actual route incident information (e.g. accident on highway A2, anticipated delay 5 minutes).

Wikipedia has a page on TMC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_Message_Channel

Jelle

I don't know how TMC works in the rest of Europe but in the UK it definitely piggie backs onto an existing FM radio station and it is encrypted. You don't need to enter a code to decrypt it though, the nav unit manufacturers pay a licence fee and the decryption is enabled on all their TMC products.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_Message_Channel

you can disable TA as you like, but if you tune to a station and enable TA and then listen to a CD... if then the radio station begins to broadcast the "TA bits/bytes" in the RDS signal, then the radio goes from cd to radio as long as the TA bit is present