Pioneer S-DV505, XV-DV505 Listening to the radio An introduction to RDS, News, Current affairs

Listening to the radio

An introduction to RDS

European model only

Radio Data System, or RDS as it’s usually known, is a system used by FM radio stations to provide listeners with various kinds of information—the name of the station and the kind of show they’re broadcasting, for example. This information shows up as text on the display, and you can switch between the kind of information shown. Although you don’t get RDS information from all FM radio stations, you do with most.

Probably the best feature of RDS is that you can search automatically by type of program. So, if you felt like listening to jazz, you could search for a station that’s broadcasting a show with the program type, JAZZ. There are around 30 such program types, including various genres of music, news, sport, talk shows, financial information, and so on.

This system lets you display three different kinds of RDS information: Radio Text, Program Service Name, and Program Type.

Radio Text (RT) is messages sent by the radio station. These can be anything the broad- caster chooses—a talk radio station might give out it telephone number as RT, for example.

Program Service Name (PS) is the name of the radio station.

Program Type (PTY) indicates the kind of program currently being broadcast.

This unit can search for and display the following program types:

NEWS	News
AFFAIRS	Current affairs
INFO	General information

SPORT	Sports
EDUCATE	Educational material
DRAMA	Radio drama
CULTURE	Arts and culture
SCIENCE	Science and technology
VARIED	Usually talk-based material,
	such as quiz shows or
	interviews.
POP M	Pop music
ROCK M	Rock music
EASY M	Easy listening music
LIGHT M	‘Light’ classical music
CLASSICS	‘Serious’ classical music
OTHER M	Other music not fitting any
	of the above categories
WEATHER	Weather reports
FINANCE	Finance and business
CHILDREN	Children’s entertainment
SOCIAL	Social affairs
RELIGION	Religious programming
PHONE IN	Phone-in talk shows
TRAVEL	Travel
LEISURE	Leisure interests and
	hobbies
JAZZ	Jazz music
COUNTRY	Country music
NATION M	Popular music in a lan-
	guage other than English
OLDIES	Popular music from the ’50s
FOLK M

DOCUMENT Documentaries

In addition, there is a program type, ALARM!, used for exceptional emergency announcements. You can’t search for this, but the tuner will switch automatically to this RDS broadcast signal.

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English

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