Photo RDS - Radio in Colour !

Photo RDS - Radio in Colour ! A Proposal for an Enhanced RDS System

The LCD Text Display used by the RDS receiver would be replaced by an enlarged LCD Display of the type used in a 70 Dollar Pocket Sized Colour Television
This would allow:
#1 Display of the STATION LOGO in full Colour with the current graphic design,
instead of only the station name in text.
#2 A COLOUR SLIDESHOW
The "colour slides" could change at up to once per second.
They would contain pictures relevant to the programme content, prepared on a PC using any basic graphics software such as Paint Shop Pro.
Pop music stations could show scans from the Cover of the CD being heard, pictures of the artists, and of the deejay, while News stations could show news pictures. The LCD could also display advertisements.

Examples of Station Logos from various UK Radio Stations, and artist and deejay pictures, in 160 x 120 format, as they would appear on a "Photo RDS" receiver :

Economical:
The system proposed would allow the following types of product marketing.
# Portable Radios with Photo RDS at about the same price as Pocket TV.
# Portable CD/MD/Cassette/Radio combinations with Photo RDS display for a small extra cost.
# Stereo Midi systems with Photo RDS display at insignificant extra cost.
# Car Radios with Photo RDS display at insignificant extra cost.

Suitability:

# Small Portable Receivers for young people - Photo RDS is particularly suitable for this market. No radio without it could possibly be considered as being any good at all next to a radio that has it. It has all the potential of becoming a "must have" accessory, along the lines of Game Boy, pagers or mobile phones.

# Car radios - As the display changes only once per second, it may prove to be no more distracting to the driver than it is to read the existing RDS Text display. If it is considered more distracting, then Photo RDS should be made visible only to the passengers, while the driver can see only a text display.

Technical Proposals:
The enhanced data capacity is provided by a second, wider bandwidth data subcarrier at 4 times pilot tone frequency, 76 kHz, with a bandwidth of approx
+ and - 10 kHz, giving rise to a symbol rate of 20 k symbols per second. The new subcarrier deviates the main carrier by a similar amount to the existing 57 kHz subcarrier. To work effectively in this high noise environment, the number of phase or amplitude states is restricted to 4, ie quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) is used, providing 2 bits per symbol. This produces a 40 k bit per second data channel. It's just the same speed as we are familiar with using everyday on an internet PC.
The LCD Pocket Colour TV Display requires a picture size of 160 x 120 pixels.
The "Photo RDS" Radio receiver would include a hardware JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) decoder.
Each 160 x 120 jpeg picture would contain about 4 k bytes of data (32 k bits), which is compatible with the slideshow refresh rate of up to once per second.

If you have any comments or suggestions
mailto:stephen@sptv.demon.co.uk