RDS 2 station logos

Alun

I've just got a new car with a fancy infotainment system, and when scanning for radio stations I was initially disappointed that it wasn't showing station logos, like I've seen on many other new cars recently.

Than all of a sudden one station, Dub City, popped up complete with (garish, red and yellow!) logo.

I'd always thought these were hardwired in the head unit, but it appears that RDS2 supports sending logos, so I assume this is where it came from.

If that's the case, then why don't any of the other stations display them? Are they using an old version of RDS, can't be bothered implementing them, or is it something else like they only transmit them now and then, or is it maybe signal strength related?

Any ideas?

ITV2

The only logo/idents I've seen on my car radio was the Freedab stations when on and BBC radio stations, I also noticed RTE Gold had one for Rick O'Shea but that has since disappeared.

JDxtra

I had suspected that Dublin City FM had swapped out their RDS unit. Or maybe they are now are using an audio processor at transmission site that is also encoding their MPX signal for the transmitter (so generating stereo and RDS encoding).

So it is possible they are now using a device that supports RDS2. I think it will be a very long time before anyone else follows them (if ever).

Logos in the VW group of cars are part of the software in the car, but logos can be added to manually by the user. DAB supports station logos/images by default.

Alun

Thanks for that information. The car is a Kia by the way, and as far as I can see there's no way to manually install logos. It has no DAB capability, or at least Kia have disabled it for the Irish market as I can't imagine they actually go to the bother of manufacturing two different head units, one with and one without DAB hardware, so I can't test that feature out.