Radio station display is weird

[pgregory54]

I have a 2008 XC70 with premium audio. The display screen is supposed to show the call letters of the radio station, the frequency, and the title and artist of the tune playing. More than once (and currently on an ongoing basis) my favorite rock station has its call letters and frequency displayed, but underneath, instead of title and artist, is a reference to another station much further up the band and its moniker Lite Rock. Since I know virtually nothing about about how the magic of this data transmission works, is this a radio software issue or something else (and is there a fix). Any thoughts or am I in a solar flare zone destined to not be able to name that tune.

Thanks.

Pgregory54

[fazool]

Not sure but it may be leftover data.

RDS stands for Radio Data Service (I think) and it basically encodes text data and sends it over the air along with the analog song signal. The radio (if RDS equipped) decodes this info and displays it. The data fields are separated (station, artist, title, etc). Many radios can choose which data to display. For example, my satellite radio can display the song name OR the artist but not both (I only have a single line display) so the radio can choose which to display.

It also takes a few seconds to update the data fields.

If you have a multi-line display, I would bet that the wrong data is just leftovers from the prior station. For example, if your top line has the song name and the bottom line has the station name, but the station name is wrong. In that case, I would bet that the correct station simply isn't broadcasting that data field and the radio is using the previous data it stored while trying to get a clear signal with the correct field. In essence its waiting until it gets the correct field and its probably waiting for the data or trying to read it.

One experiment might be to change stations and turn the radio off etc. Do this to clear the RDS data and see if the wrong info goes away.