Intolerant ******* wrote:
I've recently picked up a Sangean HDT-1 for a song ($70 bucks
shipped), and have hooked it up to my stereo. I have noticed several
stations here in the Twin Cities that do not utilize the display
features of HD Radio, and was wondering if it was due to a)
incompetent engineers, b) incompetent listener (me!), or c)
incompetent corporations (Ibiquity or Clear Channel?).

If you have an automation system playing your music, it's no problem
to put the song titles on RDS and in the HD radio stream.

If you have an automation system switching feeds from remote sources,
you can't really do that because the automation system doesn't know
anything about what is playing other than what the source is. At best
you can display the show title.

If you have an actual human being playing records, you're totally out
of luck with the display. But hopefully with an actual human being
he's going to announce what he's playing (and at worst you can call up
the studio and ask him what he just played... and he might even play a
request).

I've also noticed that there are varying degrees of info passed on via
the display; for example, the stations marked with (###) only show the
station name and HD channel (KQRS-1), with absolutely no song/artist
data to speak of (yet it is showing up via RDS on my Grundig Ocean Boy
510); and the stations marked with (***), upon HD lock, only show the
following repeating text; "hd radio...www.HD-Radio.com"; what's
interesting about that is my Sony XDR-S3HD *does* show artist/track
info on those (***) channels... incidentally, most, if not all, of the
latter group are Clear Channel stations, so maybe they have decided to
save some money by eliminating engineers? Then again, for as much as
they have tried pushing this on the public, no one really seems to
care, so their engineers must not care too much either.

Odds are the Clear Channel folks are just repeating programming that comes
to them over the bird, and the local automation system doesn't know anything
other than it's coming off of source input such-and-so.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."