I was messing around with the stereo and trying the RDS feature of the Bose stereo. I live in Dallas, TX and there is a handful of stations that are RDS enabled. Whenever I find a station that is compliant, I press the display button. All that shows up here is just the Radio Station's call letters. I was wondering what was showing up on other people's systems.

The reason I ask this was because a friend of mine was test driving an Acura TL and ran into a station that was RDS compliant. He proceeded to tell me that it was displaying Artist and Track information.

For the people in Dallas, he stated that he got was on "The Edge" when it started displaying the info. So naturally I went back and tried the same station but all I got was just the call letters.

Anybody have better luck then me? If so, could you post a pic of what it would look like to see the info?

Thanks

 

Some stations only display the call letters while some display both call letters and artist/song info. Also, the display sometimes does not change or freezes on a certain screen.

 

I just spent about an hour in the car just messing with the stereo. It's different from station to station, but this is what I noticed.

1) If a commercial is playing or a DJ is talking either the call letters will be displayed or nothing at all.
2) If a song is playing, usually the information is displayed concerning the artist, song, and station but there are other factors to consider.
a) The speed at which the information is displayed totally depends on how fast the station wants to push it out to you.
b) Some stations play the information through out the whole song, some don't.
c) Sometimes some stations seem to have a lag. Another song will be playing with the old RDS info (even after changing stations and going back to display the information)
d) Lastly there is no subtext to describe what is being showed on the screen (example Artist, Song, Station)

Oh by the way, MacAlert01, thanks for the response.

 

Nice summary.

RDS kind of seems like a gimmick to me. I've owned the car for a year and didn't even realize we had it until I saw it recently in my friend's G.

 

Yeah, gimmick is right. After going through all the stations here in Dallas, there is only 1 station where the text switches fast enough. That station is 102.9.

Instead of including RDS with the stereo, they should have replaced that feature with MP3 playback w/ tag information. That would have been so sweet. I probably wouldn't have bought my iPod if that were the case. Oh well.