Broadcast Warehouse RDS Encoder

[Mister807]

Hello all,

Just a quick query about Broadcast Warehouse RDS unit (the standard one, think it retails at about 170 Stg). Well, it powers up fine, PTY works fine, the TP light is lit, but its not displaying the station name. Doesnt seem to be injection as the RDS light and pty are available immediately when you scan on, but no station name on most receivers. Thought it might have been a stereo encoder problem but no joy there. Any ideas?

Mister 807

[021]

from another posting
http://www.radiowavesforum.com/rw/showthread.php?threadid=1576
"I have heard that some car radios don't like the RDS unless it is locked to the stereo (19khz) pilot tone."

Not true. Otherwise surely this would imply that a station has to have a stereo pilot for RDS to work on these car radios. RDS is a system available for both stereo and mono transmissions. The proof of this is that the very same car radios which have problems with a station in Cork said to be using a BW RDS, have no problem whatsoever displaying the RDS of RLO which has NO stereo (or stereo pilot).

"I'm not sure why this is, as far as I'm aware, the synchronising of the two tones is to cut out the whirring sound caused by them being out of phase with one another."

This IS true however, synchronising RDS with the stereo pilot will greatly lessen any whirring breaking through from the RDS on stereo audio with multipath reception

[andy walker]

Mono FM Member

Fave station:
Registered: Mar 2002
Location: Cork
Posts: 135 (0.47 posts per day)
Or they are probably using one of the Broadcast Warehouse budget RDS encoders (the type with basic RDS functions which are set using 4 yellow buttons on the PCB)
It seems to be acknowledged they do not work on 100% of all RDS radios!

This is true we had to get our first rds bw encoder modified,
With rds the stereo has to be set @ 19khz and the rds tone has to be set @ 57 khz if its set at over 57khz you get sibalance and other strange effects!

[021]

This may be of interest, a friend emailed this down to me, some technical questions from well over a year ago about the Broadcast Warehouse budget RDS encoder (the one with the 4 yellow buttons to program) mentioned here. Not sure if the problem about selecting lowercase letters exists on the current version:

>My first
>question concerns the callibration of its output level
>The RDS encoder is to be used to mix with the stereo composite,(i.e. no
>dedicated RDS input on TX)
>
>I have a stereo encoder which I know is accurately callibrated for the
>transmitter concerned, and I have an oscilloscope. What proportion should
>the peak-to-peak voltage of the RDS waveform (on its own) be to the stereo
>encoder's 19kHz pilot (on its own) pk-to-pk voltage?????

I would set it at a third of the pilots level.

>
>A second question, when initially programming the unit it was possible to
>select either upper and lowercase letters for the PS (station name). However
>later on if I attempted to change a uppercase letter it was then only possible to
>select letters as uppercase only (lowercase letters now being left out of
>the selectable characters cycle for that position).
>When it was possible for lowercase letters to be selected they did indeed appear as
>lowercase on suitable RDS receivers. (a lot of RDS receivers show lowercase
>PS letters as uppercase only, but this is of course a different issue). Is the above
>issue of lowercase letters on the encoder a software glitch??

The eeprom is blank at switch on and the unit will allow full ASCII
character set. Once into uppercase area of the character set your stuck
and it's intentional.

**************************************** ***************
Broadcast Warehouse ( FM Transmitters and accessories )
website: www.broadcastwarehouse.com
email: info@broadcastwarehouse.com
phone:
sales: +44 208 5409992
tech support: +44 208 5409993
fax: +44 208 5409994
**************************************** ***************