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| Friday, February 13, 2004 |
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Sellers markets 
| | I have a friend here in town who wants to explore selling a variety of stuff on the Web: clocks, puzzles, writing and more. But he's not sure how to make it happen. I've never explored this subject at all. Whaddya do here? Yahoo? Amazon? eBay? Those are the "brands" in my mind. Are there others that make more sense? |
Pointing home a drive
| | After dropping off David and Dan at the airport in San Diego yesterday at the start of rush hour, I headed home to Santa Barbara on The Five. (In Southern California, highways take articles. The highway called "101" in the Bay Area is "The 101" in Los Angeles.) Traffic moved smoothly for a few minutes, then slowed to a crawl for the next twenty miles. |
| | I thought about cutting over to the Pacific Coast Highway. But I didn't know the area well enough, and didn't have local maps. I wished I'd had a vocalizing GPS like the iQue 3600 (which I covet); but I didn't, so I went to SCAN on the radio. San Diego seems to lack a full-time news station like KCBS in San Francisco and KNX in Los Angeles (both of which stopped SCAN on the radio while I was parked on The Five). The two big local talkers, KOGO and KFMB, were both running their nationally syndicated right-wingers (Hedgecock on KOGO and Hannity on KFMB). When I finally caught some traffic (I think on KPBS, the NPR station), there was no mention of any traffic on The Five. Then I remembered that not reporting standard tie-ups is also standard, pretty much everywhere. Still, no help. |
| | There Has To Be A Better Way, right? |
| | Well, there is. You'll notice that many of the radios in new cars in have this little RDS symbol. If you're lucky and some local stations take advantage of RDS (Radio Data System), you'll see the station nickname instead of the frequency on the radio's display (e.g. Rock 105 instead of 105.1). Some stations in the U.S. now take advantage of RDS support for displaying current songs or slow-mo messages (RDS only displays 8 characters, but that's still better than none). |
| | If broadcasters bothered to transmit RDS data the way they do in Europe (where it was developed), we might see some use for the "traffic" button that's also featured on some RDS-ready radios. Dig this from a U.K. FAQ on RDS: |
| | The radio display can show if the station broadcasts travel information. Since most stations do anyway, this feature by itself is of limited value. The Traffic Announcement (TA) feature allows interruption of a CD or cassette tape when there is a travel report from the radio station that is currently tuned-in. The radio will automatically switch from CD or tape to the radio for the duration of the travel announcement. |
| | Also this about EON, a facility of RDS: |
| | Most RDS tuners are now fitted with the EON facility, which offers the ability for local stations to 'break into' a national station's broadcast for the duration of a Traffic Announcement. When listening to a BBC national station, such as BBC Radio 3, EON will tell the radio about any traffic bulletins being broadcast by BBC stations in the local area. The radio would switch to the local BBC radio station for the travel bulletin, then back to the national station when the bulletin had finished. For example, when travelling through Oxford whilst BBC Radio 2 is tuned-in, the radio will switch to BBC Radio Oxford for any travel bulletins, with the TA function switched on. This feature is not usually implemented on commercial radio stations, such as Classic FM. While a proportion of the RDS datastream is used to provide programme and contact information for Classic FM, a small amount is classed as an "Additional Services Licence". This spare capacity on the RDS is used by Itis Holdings to provide a RDS-TMC (Radio Data System-Traffic Message Channel) service, using Classic FM's RDS. Cars fitted with the necessary electronics are able to decode this information and it is used to provide navigational and traffic information. |
| | The U.S. RDS standard (called RDBS, although most still call it RDS) doesn't support everything in the European standard, it's still the European standard and chipsets that are deployed in the U.S. radios equipped with RDS. Meaning: it can be done. Or so I'm told. |
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