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Since I started experimenting with/using BBP I always used Airomate as a RDS coder. But I got certain complaints about RDS not performing as good as it should. But I never got my hands on a tuner that did NOT perform good with Airomate. So I kept thinking, is it Airomate? Is it the filtering in BBP? Is it the BBP 16khz audio bandwidth that some radio’s can’t handle? I couldn’t find a good way to test and draw a conclusion.
Until I tried RDS on a friend’s cheap clarion car stereo, it was not performing good, it was skipping PS lines all the time. The radio didn’t have a problem with RDS of any other legal station on the air. So there I finally had a tuner to test with.
So the first thing I tried was shutting down BBP, and let Airomate broadcast it’s own pilot with RDS directly on the soundcard. I set the level’s exactly the same as with BBP 9% pilot 5% RDS. But the problem was the same. So no blame on BBP. Then I tried a second test, using stereotool which features a RDS coder as well. And with Stereotool at the same levels RDS was running great! So I hooked up stereo tool to BPP using the pipeline, And disabled all it’s features except RDS and stereo generation and again perfect RDS! I also saw a difference on my own car stereo, after tuning in RDS appears faster then with Airomate. So this is definitely a improvement! I don’t know what’s the difference between the two coders, but there definitely is one.
Also this is just a small test, and I’m not saying stereotool has the “perfect” RDS coder. But for those with unexplainable RDS problems it’s worth a shot.
Good luck!
Dennis Lansink
The NetherlandsOkay thanks for sharing this! 🙂
I’ve got the same problems with Airomate, the problem with skipped PS lines.
Maybe can Leif take a look on this "problem"?Leif can’t solve that because it’s not BBP problem !
i tested all RDS progs.. and Airomate was worst one !
Stereo tool have much better and cleaner RDS signal ..
You tryed something that i try many month ago.
BBP + Airomate … always some problems and not so clean signal.
BBB + StereoTool (with RDS only on output) – Best combination. 😉@SDF
No Leif can’t fix this it’s an Airomate problem, as you can read in the topic"No blame on BBP".
@Boki
If you found that out months ago why didn’t you share it over here? I’m sure many Airomate users are interested.@Boki
What does that have to do with it?
You did find the bug, and you do read/post in this forum(Otherwise you wouldn’t have responded anyway).
So no reason to not post it…For Diekgait:
I don’t try RDS coder from Stereo Tool, but I agree with you, with and without BBP, I can’t get fast PS changes, the minium for a good visualization is 3 seconds, and is not a problem of my receiver (integrated Clarion in my car) because other radio stations with a hardware RDS coder have changes of PS each 1 or 2 seconds.
This night, I go to try the RDS of Stereo Tool and I past on this post the results.
Thanks!
[quote author=”Diekgait”]@SDF
No Leif can’t fix this it’s an Airomate problem, as you can read in the topic"No blame on BBP".[/quote]
Okay clear to me 😀The problem seems to happen when users want to switch the PS names fast.
Airomate tries to follow the offical RDS specifications as much as possible.
Following the specifications it is not allowed to use dynamic PS. It is only allowed in the US.
For this reason Airomate uses a very slow repetition rate for the PS messages and use a higher repetition rate for RadioText (recomended by the specifications). With the default repetition rates it takes about 1 second for broadcasting 1 complete PS message but a RDS decoder needs to receive at least 2 times the same PS message before it shows the message. So that means that it take at least 2 seconds before the RDS decoder shows the message. However, under typical reception conditions the introduction of errors will cause the receiver to take 4 seconds or more to acquire the PS name for display.But there is a solution in Airomate v2 beta 1.
In Airomate version 2 beta 1 or higher, it is possible to raise the repetition rate of the PS messages.
Go to Settings -> RDS -> Groups settings.
And raise the repetition type A and B for group type 0.
Try using a repetition rate of about 50.
If it is not enough then try a higher rate.There is one thing I’m sure of and that is that Airomate produces a very clean RDS signal without data errors.
I do hope this will solve the problem, if not please let me know.This is Pilot+RDS from Airomate and StereoTool at ~100%
Airomate – StereoTool
on stereotool both pilot and RDS are rockstable numbers but on airomate variate +-0.05% (when pilot is at 8%)
Is this good ?Thanks for the quick reply, Arjen!
Dennis, could you try his suggestion and get back to us?I recognize Airomate’s signal as the top photo, because of the crap in the skirts below 54 and above 60 kHz. It’s well below the noise floor of FM so it doesn’t matter in practice, but it does look ugly.
Breakaway specifically filters that out of the RDS input, so the output of Breakaway looks more like ST’s output.
Not that it matters, but perhaps Arjen could improve the filters in Airomate for absolute picture-perfect performance? 🙂
Best,
///LeifYes, the filters can be improved.
Airomate was designed to run on old computers like Pentium III.
But now days the performance isn’t an issue anymore.
If you look at the CPU usage of Airomate running in RDS only mode on modern computers then you can see that Airomate almost doesn’t use any CPU. That leaves me some room to improve the filter.I will test Airomate with the recommended settings as soon as I have the car-radio available again. By the way I never used a quicker setting then 3 sec with Airomate. With 3 sec the car stereo was still skipping most of the ps lines while with stereotool at 2 sec it ran smooth.
But we’ll see how it performs with the new settings. I’ll keep you guys posted.Dennis
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