Text is not displaying on the radio

[drums114]

I bought the EDM fm transmitted however I am having a hard time getting the text to display on the radio.  Any ideas anyone?  I bought the cable and went through the doc many times however it is
still not displaying on the radio.  The radio does display text for
other radio stations.  I verified in the device manager I am using the
correct com port.  I also see LOR updating mini rds software however
there is no text on the radio.

Any other things to check you think?

[Steven]

There are 2 possible causes. One is that MiniRDS is not communicating with the RDS chip in the radio. The second is that the RDS settings are not correct, which is causing bad or no RDS info to be sent.

 

Checking for correct communication is not easy, since the MiniRDS encoder (which has been replaced by the newer MicroRDS encoder, but EDM designed their RDS transmitter before the MicroRDS was available), uses only the I²C communication method, which is not designed for use over a cable between 2 distinct systems.

 

Try this:

1. Power-cycle the transmitter
2. If MiniRDS is running, exit.
3. Delete the file "minirds.rds" (in the same directory as minirds.exe. It contains the settings we want to forget.)
4. Launch MiniRDS.
5. Click the "Receive" button. It won't tell you if it fails, but it will put 0000 in the PI field. and zero everything else if it can't read from the transmitter.

If it fails in this manner, then communication may not be working. Check that you are using only the cable from EDM, and that it is plugged into a "real" serial port.

 

It could also be that the transmitter has invalid settings. To tell the difference between this and failing communication, repeat steps 2-4 above. Don't click "Receive". The PI field should be at the default 'FFFF'. Click "Send" to send this to the transmitter, then "Receive" to see if it got it. If the PI field goes to '0000' again, then the problem is the communication between the MiniRDS program and the RDS encoder in the transmitter.

[testraub]

I had a few problems with the RDS as well.  Found that turning on BOTH forms of RDS (dynamic and radio text) solved the problem.  (ie: friends Ford read fine, but another friends Fiat did not til I turned both on.)

 

Tom Straub

[drums114]

The PI field should be at the default 'FFFF' was the problem.  Thanks.