Just chugging around the interwebs and saw this oddity, anybody know what FM Data Receiver's do? I'm thinking a duplex pager with FM/TV tuning?
From the first green box. "What is FM text broadcasting? It's a broadcasting service that uses FM radio waves to send text information along with audio. Officially, it's called FM text multiplex broadcasting. You can enjoy a wide variety of programs from news and weather forecasts to event, entertainment information and local community news. However, depending on the radio wave conditions, there may be cases where you can receive the FM station's audio but cannot receive the text broadcast." So it looks like it is just teletext for radio. There is some information on the patent here. As a side note, have I discovered my first thing that AI is actually useful for? It does a pretty damn good job of translating text into actually legible sentences!
I wonder if it is related to RDS. That is good enough for putting things like song titles on a Radio's display.
I thought that initially, but I think it is much more capable than the small amount of information the RDS system can send. The patent even talks about "broadcasting of text/diagram/sound services".
Is it something like what I have with my 20 year old car radio/navigation system? It lets me see current traffic jams. The thing doesn't have a data connection otherwise, so I assume that information comes through the FM radio signal?
We used to have pagers here, it would beep with a short message and phone number to call. Private companies would "host" the service but other than that I don't know how the system was set up. I assume they rented tower space to broadcast? I remember one headquarters, a small office building, had a decent sized antenna maybe 60-80 feet tall, would that be enough to cover a small city? I'm pretty sure the Japanese were doing similcast broadcasting, the reason a lot of their boomboxes have TV channels on the FM band, maybe this is an extension of that?
I'm not really sure. The limit to Australian technology was usually a sign saying "Tune to AM 675kHz for emergency information"! Apart from that it was just what you could see in front of you.
Not really. I remember one car we had having an AM stereo radio, but I don't think we ever used it except to test if it worked. Whether that was different in the country I am not sure. In my city at least, AM radio tended to get much more interference from the overhead tram wires. In 1990, most of the big music stations that were still on AM switched over to FM and left just the talkback and sports channels on AM, so stereo was superfluous. When we got out of the city we would always switch to tapes. I would have said DAB+ radio similarly came and went, but I just looked a new car add and it does have digital radio, although all its selling features are phone stuff. Interestingly I was listening to the radio on the weekend in the car on the weekend and the local "rock" station and they were playing the exact same music they were the last time I listened 20 years ago, there was only one song I had not heard before. Ditto with my local supermarket, the shopping centre in general, and the vast majority of other shops and pubs that play music. Actually, Coles Radio is probably better than many of the radio stations for variety these days, although they apparently have a "monthly playlist" that gets hammered into their employees until the new month starts!
I only remember AM radio in cars for maybe two or three years at most in the mid-80's. It was definately better quality but it never took off, we had over 14 great FM stations I could listen to plus the oldies and talk on AM. Our last local station recently quit broadcasting in AM stereo but they are still on the air. Just doing research, there's a ton of articles of AM stereo from down under during the 80's, it makes it seem like you guys were all-in for it.
