I was doing a little research on RDS and I was wondering if it's possible to seek to a active rds station in the background and extract the time info from rds. Would be a nice alternative to a stick on clock :)

This is probably possible while listening to MP3 files. It would have to be clever about finding the strongest station since I wouldn't want it to get the timezone from the BBC transmitters in Jersey when driving through Northern France :-)

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Mike Crowe
I may not be speaking on behalf of empeg above :-)

Speaking from little experience, and being a bit new on the forum, I carefully, and with low voice - inform, that my Sony minidisc (forgot the model, but one of the old ones) autoradio does it. It works perfectly, and I think it should be doable, to detect where you are (ie take time from the ten stations autosearced, and see what time the majority of the stations provide). One downside though: Watch out for primitive stations, broadcasting with advanced equipment, they do not know how to control. You may see some funny hrs broadcasted to your display (How come this is more often in french spoken areas?)

Yes, it is always important to remember that not all broadcasters know what they're doing. I remember recently that one of the UK channels (probably Channel 5 but don't hold me to it) was broadcasting the wrong time in one of the PDC teletext lines and this really confused some videos.

We've already hit upon an interesting interpretation of the RDS standard on one of the local stations here in Cambridge. Unless we can think of a way round it you won't see the radiotext on this station unless you have a perfect signal :-)

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Mike Crowe
I may not be speaking on behalf of empeg above :-)

I was just about to start a new thrad about Radio text as a wish (haven't found it in the specs (but who reads the manual anyway)), but your last posting implies, that it is allready built in??

Yes, radiotext support was in beta5c. It scrolls along the bottom of the screen if you have information on. The transmission frequency of radiotext is such that it can take quite a while to appear if you don't have a good signal.

The BBC actually use radiotext to give the name of the programme etc. (and other things apparently) - presumably this is integrated with their DAB stuff.

Commercial and BBC local stations don't seem to do a lot. In fact you can probably drive round most of the country seeing "A BETTER MUSIC MIX FOR .+(SHIRE)?" :-)

Presumably the situation in other European countries is similar.

It also picks up AF packets but doesn't actually do anything with them yet.

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Mike Crowe
I may not be speaking on behalf of empeg above :-)