What is the Radio Data System?
The Radio Data System is a ‘hidden’ communications channel within the FM radio transmission structure that provides the listener with certain added reception features, and gives the broadcaster a path for sending text and other data and for exercising some control over the listener’s radio. RDS provides certain ‘housekeeping’ functions to help the listener find and maintain the programming he prefers, as well as affording a complete information channel of modest speed, or ‘throughput’. Digital RDS data is transmitted as a robust, inaudible ‘subcarrier’ at a level that does not compromise main channel audio performance or in any way interfere with other analog (SCA) or special-function digital (paging or instrumentation) FM subcarrier services. What is the history of the Radio Data System? RDS was developed in Europe in the early 1980s, with service beginning there between 1984 and 1987. By the mid-1990s, nearly every FM station in Europe had implemented RDS. Today there is hardly a sta
