RDS Question with iDrive

I use RDS on my FM radio and I have a question. When I'm listening to a station it displays the station, song, and artist like it's supposed to do. But it also displays "LOCAL-12" or what ever number it wants to instead of "12" on any of my presets. I also noticed that what ever song was playing when I set up some of my presets is what is ALWAYS displayed all the time for that station and not what is currently playing. Any one else experience this?

Originally Posted by mflemon

I use RDS on my FM radio and I have a question. When I'm listening to a station it displays the station, song, and artist like it's supposed to do. But it also displays "LOCAL-12" or what ever number it wants to instead of "12" on any of my presets. I also noticed that what ever song was playing when I set up some of my presets is what is ALWAYS displayed all the time for that station and not what is currently playing. Any one else experience this?

So the local thing I have too but it's not for all stations. I noticed when I drove to
San Diego on memorial weekend that it did display things properly as far as the
station names is concerned. So I attributed that to the station not transmitting proper
or enough RDS info. As far as the song displayed goes, I haven't noticed but now that
you mentioned it I will and let you know.

I wonder if the local thing is a San Diego thing...

No, it isn't. I get channels called "Local-3", etc, too here in Boston.

Any idea why that happens? Now mine say "song title, artist, station name, and LOCAL-"#""

Wouldn't you know it, I went out to the garage and tried mine... well local-12, local....!

Somebody out there has to know the reason why RDS does this. I am trying something. I turned off RDS and I'm letting the car "sleep" over night and in the morning I'm going to turn RDS back on to see what happens. Stay tuned, the mystery continues...

This only addresses the issue in the original post of why the song playing is displayed.

I just went through this yesterday, and here's how it seemed to work. If RDS is on when setting the presets, the identification of each preset is set to whatever is on the display when that preset is saved. So one way to do it is to hit save at the moment when the station call letters appears in the display.

What I thought was easier was to turn off RDS, then save my presets, then turn RDS back on. That way, each preset is the station frequency rather (e.g., 101.3).

I went and turned off RDS overnight and turned it back on the next morning and it worked, however the thing with the song title is still there. I'm going to try to reprogram without RDS.