Back in November of 2002, I purchased my first "new" used vehicle as the car I (mostly) drove since turning 16 used its last lifeline to turn the 110,000 mile marker. Both vehicles that I had owned previously were Pontiacs and I had been very pleased with them, so my time car shopping eventually found me settling on a practically new (7,000 miles) Grand AM SE. Since my previous car was built in 1991, sitting in a car that was 11 years newer was like going from from a 486-DX2 to a P4 3GHz computer. The highly touted features of the previous vehicle consisted of A/C and an automatic transmission. It didn't even have a tape deck. Now I'm spoiled with power locks, automatic headlights, and intermittent wipers. The sad part is that my vehicle doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of "standard" features that a slightly more expensive vehicle would have.
One of the more intriguing, if not esoteric, functions of the Grand Am is the radio. It supports something called the Radio Data System. Reading about this feature in the manual really piqued my interest and I was excited to give it a go. In a nutshell, RDS lets radio stations embed information in to their broadcast signals that radios supporting RDS can then display. Types of information that might be included is the name of the radio station, a musical genre that describes the station's content, and even information about songs and artists.
Sadly, I was very disappointed to discover that very few stations in the metro-Milwaukee area supported this feature in late 2002. IIRC, the only one I found at the time was a Christian music station that came up as "The Fish" whenever it was the active radio station. In due time, more stations in the area have slowly started adding support for RDS. In my 5 radio presets, 3 support display of the station name - Rock 102 One, FM106, and 99WMYX with Rock 102 One being the only station I regularly listen to (the other two stations being "family friendly" ones I save for times when I'm not traveling alone). My other 2 rock stations STILL don't support it.
As "cool" as it is to see the station name be displayed by the radio when tuning in to one of the aforementioned 3 radio stations, it is pretty useless. I mean, the novelty wears off pretty quick that "oooh...it knows it's name". I mean, come on. My 19-month old daughter knows her name, too, and she doesn't have the financial backing of a mult-billion dollar media company. So, I was extremely impressed to discover the other day that one station has finally forged ahead to start using this potential - 99WMYX.
While scanning through my radio stations, I noticed a bit more text than normal being displayed while the radio was on 99 WMYX. I paid a bit more attention to it and noticed that it was broadcasting the artist name and song name that was currently being played by the station. Hallelujah! Why can't more radio stations do this? Nothing is more annoying than hearing a song you like and not knowing who or what the name is! I'm not patient enough to sit through 3 more songs (which I probably won't like) for a DJ to mumble out the names as if we already know who they are. It's one of my biggest beefs with radio stations and a solution has been available to it for years. Talk about slow adoption of new technology! Perhaps that explains why Googling for "Radio Data System" yields pages of results to URLs in Europe.