The National Radio Systems Committee has approved several updates to its RDS guidelines.
Chairman of the RBDS Subcommittee Dan Mansergh, director of media technology for KQED, San Francisco tells Radio World the biggest change was incorporating guidelines for how to use RDS for emergency alerting.
Stations use different FM subcarriers, and the most popular are 92 MHz and 67 MHz, said NRSC Chairman and Greater Media VP Radio Engineering Milford Smith.
Stations employ RDS for several revenue-generating uses, say the experts, such as traffic data and iTunes Tagging. They describe the guidelines as a practical, nuts and bolts collection of best practices that station engineers can use to implement any service that uses RDS.
The NRSC last updated its RDS usage guidelines about a year and a half ago.
The updated guidelines will be released once the NRSC sponsoring organizations NAB and CEA have reviewed the document.
