Clear Channel to enhance radio ads with RDS

[Dan Strassberg]

I have, on several occasions, rented Ford Focuses in Tampa while visitng my
mom at the assisted-living facility. These were cars of several different
model years. NONE of the Focus radios had manual tuning controls, unless you
consider the Seek and Scan functions to be such controls. The effect of this
control strategy is that you can't tune to weak stations, which the radio IS
capable of receiving satisfactorily. I was able to demonstrate that effect
by listening to AM skywave signals while parked. Scan or seek would stop at
a strong skywave signal, which would then fade down. If I scanned or
"sought" at that point, I could not get the radio to return to the station
to which it had been tuned, but until the station faded so much that it was
completely inaudible, the radio would not on its own scan or seek to a
stronger adjacent signal.

IIRC, all this technology DID include a memory of the last manually invoked
tuning function, so if I had arrived at the last-tuned station by Seeking,
the deep signal fade would cause the radio to simply move up the dial to the
next strong station and stop on it, but if I had arrived by Scanning, the
deep fade would cause the radio to commence moving from station to station
pausing for about 15 sec on each station it found. The car's owner's manuals
are never in the glove compartments (Enterprise must remove them), so I
never have figured out how to cancel the scan function when the radio stops
at a station I can live with. There has to be a way to do this or the scan
function would be useless.

I forget the name of the company that Ford spun off to make radios and such,
but I wonder how much cost they eliminate from the radio by eliminating the
tuning knob. BTW, to save dashboard space, the scan and seek buttons are
really small, so finding them while driving usually requires me to take my
eyes off the road. I don't think that's a safe design. If Ford or the radio
manufacturer consider Scan and Seek to be so important, I think they should
be implemented by multiple presses of the rotary tuning control (one press
Seek up, two presses, Seek down, three presses Scan; if in Scan mode, one
press would cancel Scan). I would also eliminate auto scan/seek on deep
fades; in a deep fade, I would require the user to press the tuning control
once to return to the last used auto-tuning function. In addition to
restoring manual tuning, this design would make it easier to find the tuning
function without looking away from the road.

--
Dan Strassberg, dan.strassberg@att.net
eFax 707-215-6367

----- Original Message -----
From: Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
To: <billo@shoreham.net>
Cc: <bri@bostonradio.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2004 7:56 PM
Subject: RE: Clear Channel to enhance radio ads with RDS


> <<On Thu, 1 Jan 2004 10:59:22 -0500, "Bill O'Neill" <billo@shoreham.net>
said:
>
> > Gotta admit, unless they integrate the radio so that the "dial" is
amidst the
> > guage cluster, it does make for an odd turn of the head.  Bigger
downside is
> > radio simply can't afford to lose any more listeners than it has
already.
>
> One of the most annoying things about my car radio is that, while the
> volume controls (which would be easy to reach anyway) are duplicated
> in the steering wheel, the tuning knob (which requires a stretch to
> reach) is not.  I guess they assume that most drivers will cheerfully
> flip through nine presets in sequence to get to the station they want,
> and no driver will ever listen to both AM and FM stations.
>
> -GAWollman
>