In article , Simon Long
writes
Hi All,

I've just fitted a new Kenwood KDC-PSW9527 stereo to my car, which is
very good, but I have noticed an odd bit of behaviour.

It is an RDS radio, which therefore displays the name of the station
you are listening to, rather than the frequency. This works perfectly
on every station I can receive except for Q103 (the local commercial
station). When tuned to Q103, the display resolutely shows the
frequency rather than the station name.

The radio is definitely getting RDS information from Q103 - the PTY
and AF services work. According to my home RDS tuner, Q103 is
transmitting a station name - "_Q103_", which was also displayed
correctly on my previous Kenwood car stereo.

On browsing through a list of station name (PS) codes transmitted by
UK RDS stations, I noticed something odd - very few stations use
underscores which are displayed on the screen. There are two
underscore characters used in PS codes, one of which is displayed as a
space, and the other of which is displayed as an underscore - the
"space" character is used by most PS codes, but the "underscore" is
very uncommon.

I suspect that there is a firmware bug in new Kenwood stereos that
means they will fail to display PS names which contain the underscore
character - I can't believe this a fault specific to my particular
stereo.

Has anyone else in the Cambridge area got a recent Kenwood HU - this
year's range have model numbers ending in a "7"? If so, can you get a
name from Q103, or do you just get "103.0" on the display?

Cheers,

Simon

FWIW Q103 had some of their transmitting equipment nicked last week
including the RDS encoder!. Apparently this took some time to replace.

I've forwarded your post onto ntl broadcast they might find it of
interest!..

Perhaps something obscure is happening with the new coder....
--
Tony Sayer