DAB radio losing preset station names

[themaiz]

My radio (not DAB) gave me a start the other day...

Suddenly the RDS text displayed on my classical station was announcing songs from another station.

Given the artists and song titles, I'm guessing it was a "Hits from the Eighties" type station.

I went around the dial and couldn't find a local station that matched the content, but noticed that the text was correct for every station, except my classical station.

Best guess?

Somebody was broadcasting the RDS text for a different, interstate, station on their frequency.
(i.e. somebody at the national classical station had re-tuned a device to the wrong feed)

I have also noticed in the past, that the text on that station sometimes was half an hour ahead of the program content...

These things suggest to me that there are a lot of things that can go wrong with broadcast radio.

(Here in Adelaide, we had a repeater station in the city broadcasting the wrong station for a couple of hours, because a technician in that room thought that the 'tuner' in the rack was just for that room. He changed it to his favourite radio station while he was working in the room, and left it in that condition.)

The way RDS on FM works is quite different to how DAB+ works. And it would be quite hard (if not impossible) for one station to acquire another station's RDS data on the way past. If you have a way to PM me offline, I'd like to find out what happened to 5MBS (out of personal interest).

There is nothing to prevent a software-defined-radio having a horrible bug, but even then it's hard to imagine how that would happen in practice. But your repeater station story is cute. That definitely can happen (and clearly did!).