RDS Surveyor, multi-platform RDS decoder

RDS Surveyor is being developed by Christophe Jacquet, a French radio ehtusiast.

Project links:

• Github project page

RDS Surveyor is a complete open-source tool for decoding and analyzing Radio Data System (RDS) data. RDS (also known as RBDS in North America) is a communication protocol for embedding streams of digital information in FM radio broadcasts.

RDS Surveyor is Java-based, hence it runs on all platforms. It has been successfully used on Linux, MacOS and Windows.

Supported hardware

RDS Surveyor can use diverse data sources:

• RTL-SDR USB dongles supported by librtlsdr,
• Si470x-based USB FM tuners (e.g. Silicon Lab's USBFMRADIO),
• GNS FM9 TMC receiver,
• Video4Linux receivers which feature RDS,
• data and clock signals (as output, for example, by a TDA 7330 receiver IC) and sampled by the sound card,
• log files from itself or RDS Spy (both synchronized group data or unsynchronized bitstreams).

Supported RDS features

RDS Surveyor implements all basic RDS features, as well as a number of common Open Data Applications (ODAs):

• basic features for programme identification: PI, PTY, TP/TA, various flags,
• program service name (PS), including intelligent handling of scrolling PS,
• long program service name (LPS) defined in RDS2,
• alternative frequencies (AF),
• radiotext (RT) and RadiotextPlus (RT+),
• clock time (CT),
• cross-referencing of other networks (EON),
• radio paging (RP),
• Traffic Message Channel (TMC),
• EN301700 (cross-referencing of DAB from RDS),
• RBDS-specific features, e.g. PI-code to callsign decoding.

Contrary to off-the-shelf radio sets that give access to only a subset of RDS features, RDS Surveyor enables the user to analyze all RDS data, at various protocol levels. RDS does not discard groups with errors, instead it tries to interpret groups even when some blocks are missing. This enables RDS Surveyor to decode RDS data very quickly, even with poor reception.

The itended audience for RDS Surveyor is both end users (radio enthusiasts) who wish to get full access to RDS data, and developers who wish to re-use an RDS decoder as a library. RDS Surveyor is open source; the code is now available under the LGPL (Lesser GNU Public Licence).

How to help?

Please try and use RDS Surveyor. Then you may:

• report bugs (and successes too!),
• record RDS bitstreams, and send them to me (especially if they contain oddities), so that I can improve RDS Surveyor.

© Christophe Jacquet (contact: <MyFirstName>.<MyLastName>@gmail.com). Impressum (Mentions légales). Last modified on 2019-11-23.