Question about digital radio

[saturn]

This is just something I have been wondering about. It has no real importance to my life other than curiosity.

Ever since radio began being broadcast digitally,  I've noticed some odd anomalies. For instance,  my car radio usually displays the station and if a song is playing it will scroll Title and Artists. However each station has it's own unique tendencies. I live in DC/Baltimore area. One station DC101 gets stuck on one or two words for like a minute and then speeds through the rest. It's very distracting if you're driving and want to read it. Trying to keep eyes on road but wait for the word to change so you can catch the whole thing. Another station, 98 Rock will sometimes have the same song and artist stuck displayed for days and even weeks at a time. Another station 103.1 WRNR doesn't display song and artist on my radio, but that station does display it in my friends car. 

Any explanation for this weirdness?   

[rct]

The inability for wise, rich, super smart business adults to arrive at a standard for the number of bits used for the screen text by the repeaters and the inability of the equally super smart radio guys to arrive at the very same thing.  There's no money in having different things that work the same.

rct

[Sgt. Pepper]

Radio plays what they want. I don't ever remember my CD player not playing the one I put in the slot. Who did I put in again, seems like all the songs are by the same artist.

[Rabs]

For a while I worked with mobile phones, making games... And at the time the more different phones that would come out the more versions we had to make of every game as each phone was very different (we are talking pre-smart phones here)...

One time we went to a conference with three very big phone makers and we got to ask them questions about their plans.

I put my hand up and asked them if they could standardise more between them explaining how many versions of a single game we had to make for each game and it would make it all much easier for everyone involved..

They all literally laughed in my face.

So yeah..  People that make this stuff dont like to share their technology as they all want to be number one. 

Edited February 6, 2022 by Rabs

[mihcmac]

Sorry off topic but sort of related....

FYI regular analog radio, at times living on a island during weather emergencies and other things, the only communication I can get is through radio. So we get emergency radios, but these new emergency radios have digital tuners that don't have the fine tuning ability you need during an emergency. So we seek out radios with old style analog tuners that work way better during an emergency.

[saturn]

So if I understand. Each radio station broadcasts in it's own format depending on their physical equipment (hardware?) they use and each radio receives the digital signal in it's own way, depending on the make/model?  

Thanks

[rct]

2 minutes ago, saturn said:

So if I understand. Each radio station broadcasts in it's own format depending on their physical equipment (hardware?) they use and each radio receives the digital signal in it's own way, depending on the make/model?  

Thanks

Basically, yes.

rct