NRSC Seeks Input on RBDS

The Radio Broadcast Data System Subcommittee of the National Radio Systems Committee has been working to update a portion of the RBDS standard – the portion that concerns the text display on a radio. Radio World has reported on that process previously.
The group is considering two proposals and is seeking additional submissions to help the group decide which applications should be incorporated into the RBDS standard.
“Proposals will be accepted from anybody, including non-NRSC members,” said Clear Channel’s Jeff Littlejohn who co-chairs the RBDS Subcommittee with Entercom’s Marty Hadfield.
The subcommittee is made up of receiver and broadcast transmission engineers and radio electronic component makers, some of whom supply radios to automakers. The group is trying to imagine how this text display would work with the varied displays that radio manufacturers use now and in the future.
The RBDS Subcommittee is developing an Open Data Application for the standard. The group is trying to improve the ability of broadcasters and receiver manufacturers to display song title, artist and other program information associated with FM radio broadcasts.
“This will allow us to match up what the radio displays for analog and digital,” said Littlejohn, who said station conversions to IBOC really spurred this work. “You don’t want a consumer to see one thing (on the receiver display) in digital and then drive into a different coverage area and get something else displayed in analog,” he said.
The group expects to include the ODA in the U.S. standard for RBDS. The ODA will be open to anyone who wants to use it, said Littlejohn and David Layer, NAB’s staff liaison to the NRSC. It will also be considered as part of the IBOC standard the DAB Subcommittee is developing.
The group is considering proposals detailing how the ODA would be structured.
“We’d like more people to join the ODA working group,” said Littlejohn. Interested parties may submit specific proposals for accomplishing this to the NRSC by sending them to Megan Hayes of the Consumer Electronics Association at mhayes@ce.org or Layer at dlayer@nab.org.
The deadline for submission is Jan. 15, 2005.