silent radio
Duane Whittingham
G. Herrmannsfeldt (g...@u.washington.edu) wrote:
: Around here, and probably more places, there is a thing called
: silent radio, often seen in sports bars and places like that.
: It displays on a scrolling LED display, so you have to read it instead
: of listen to it. They have news, and related subjects, and advertizing.
: Rumor is that it is broadcast on an SCA subcarrier, but I don't really
: know. Does anyone know about this, and, if so, how it is broadcast?
: thanks in advance...
I think it is called RBDS (Radio Broadcasting Data Service), it is on a
subcarrier of the radio staion. They can send news, traffic reports, names of
songs, etc. You can get decoders for them, and I think you can pipe the data
into a computer if you wanted to. -Duane
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Harold Hallikainen
A couple friends were involved in Silent Radio here (in San Luis
Obispo, CA) a few years back. I don't believe it's operating around here
any more. As I recall, they used a dedicated subcarrier, not RBDS
Harold
David A. Kaye
Duane Whittingham wrote the quoted material below:
" I think it is called RBDS (Radio Broadcasting Data Service), it is on a
" subcarrier of the radio staion. They can send news, traffic reports, names of
" songs, etc. You can get decoders for them, and I think you can pipe the data
" into a computer if you wanted to. -Duane
No, actually this is pre-RDBS. It's plain old SCA, but in data form. In
the SF Bay Area, Silent Radio is carried on KQED-FM. In other cities, who
knows? Often the stations carrying SCA are the ones you'd least expect:
non-commercial stations, religious, and non-English language stations.
--
(c) 1996 Restaurants sell their old grease
David Kaye to recyclers for use in making soap
Norm Lehfeldt
Slight correction, David:
Silent Radio is in the vertical interval of KQED-TV. We have digital
stock market stuff on the FM SCA.
Julian Macassey
>G. Herrmannsfeldt (g...@u.washington.edu) wrote:
>: Around here, and probably more places, there is a thing called
>: silent radio, often seen in sports bars and places like that.
>
>: It displays on a scrolling LED display, so you have to read it instead
>: of listen to it. They have news, and related subjects, and advertizing.
Some time ago, I wrote an article about Silent Radio. The
inventor and founder of the company was a friend of mine. Below is the
article:
--------------------------------------------------------------
Sssh! I'm Watching SilentRadio
We all know what television is, we all know what radio is.
Television is for watching and radio is for listening to. Radio
gives us music, news and advertising. Television provides us with
Sit-Coms, news, advertising and re-runs. Television also gave us
"Sound-bites", little quickie bits of information - audio
headlines.
The origin of the sound-bite can probably be traced to the
old streaming news announcement billboards on Times Square, New
York and Picadilly Circus, London. Before television, satellites
and cellular phones, there were big billboards covered in
thousands of light bulbs. The bulbs illuminated messages, news
and advertising -just quickie headlines such as "War is Over". If
you wanted to know more, you bought a paper or huddled over the
RCA Console.
One thing about the Times Square signs was they certainly
helped pass the time. If you were waiting for something to
happen, you could watch the news headlines scroll by. But the
signs with all the lightbulbs were big bulky and expensive.
Behind the sign was a man sitting at a Teletype machine, most of
the time he ran punched tape, but he had to cut the tape and keep
things whirring. Because of the unwieldyness, these machines were
limited to the centers of major cities.
Then came the LED (Light Emitting Diode) and the
microprocessor. Using these two wonders of the seventies the
"Times Square" scrolling display could be made, small, cheap,
portable and low power. Sitting in Los Angeles garage in the mid
seventies was a young man who had already made his mark as the
designer of the system that took a TV picture and printed it on a
T-shirt. The young man was Mike Levin who put together hundreds
of LED,s and controlled the whole thing with a microprocessor
using one Kilobyte of RAM. The text was loaded in locally with a
detachable keyboard. It was a simple device by today's standards.
The first units which were sold in 1979 had a one line display.
By sitting at the keyboard the owner could type in "Eat at Joe's"
or "Try our pastrami on rye".
The drawback to the first units built my Mike was that the
owner of the display had to be a writer and a typist. So his next
enhancement was to add a computer modem to the display and
download news and ads from a remote location. This was the
beginning of the bright idea. Other manufacturers had scrolling
displays, some were progammable in the field and some were
shipped with canned messages. Mike Levin, who was calling himself
Cybernetic Data Products, now had the only unit that could change
the message and besides changing the message could offer the
latest news in headline form. These first units were installed
around Los Angeles in Supermarkets, cinema lobbies, liquor stores
and banks - any location where customers would be standing around
waiting.
One day Mike was driving down the freeway listening to his
car radio when he heard that the FCC was allowing TV stations to
experiment with Teletext. Teletext is a way of sending text and
data over the unused lines of a TV picture. The unused lines are
often referred to as the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI). The
Closed Caption system used for the hearing impaired and for
language translation uses the same system. This, Mike realized,
would be the best way to address thousands of display units
without going broke paying phone bills. So SilentRadio was born.
Mike, who learn't his video technology when designing the
TV picture on a T-shirt equipment, had no trouble coming up with
a way of sending text via TV signals. He contacted the local
Public Television station KCET and offered to pay to put data on
one of their unused picture lines. No one else wanted to use this
wasted bandwidth and KCET, like most PBS stations, was always
looking for a new way to pay the bills. A partnership was born
and Silentradio could address every unit at once to provide the
latest news updates and sports results, even the winning lottery
numbers. Also, besides sending news to every unit, SilentRadio
was designed so each invidual unit could be addressed. This meant
that each SilentRadio unit could carry a special ad or message
such as "Thanks for eating at Joe's - free Tums with every
monster sandwich" or "Happy birthday Tom at table three". The
telephone modems didn't all go away, but from hundreds of modems,
one at each SilentRadio site, they went to one leased phone line
to the TV station. The SilentRadio units each had a custom
receiver and TV antenna attached to them.
The first units, built in 1982, were a big hit in Los
Angeles and were soon improved and updated to two line models.
Advertisers could buy time on SilentRadio or businesses could
have a SilentRadio unit with only their own ads on it, and all
the local and national news and sports.
In 1984 SilentRadio went international. Units was installed
in Paris, France. The French are fascinated by text processing,
they have computerized phone books. Some phone subscribers do not
get phone books anymore, they get a computer terminal from the
phone company. Obviously something like SilentRadio was a
natural. Pierre could sit in the cafe and watch the horse racing
results come through.
After the French connection SilentRadio started spreading
across the major cities of the U.S. The news and ads were shipped
out from Los Angeles to the distant cities' TV stations via
leased data links. This also meant that when The phones went
down, so did SilentRadio. At the SilentRadio headquarters in Los
Angeles is a newsroom with wireservice feeds. Sitting in the
newsrooms are editors and technicians putting the headlines
together and feeding the ads to all the thousands of SilentRadio
display units across the U.S. The whole operation is controlled
by a large Pyramid computer. In the early days when money was
short the silent radio staff built their own monster computer by
tying 20 Apple II computers together. The old monster Apple is
still sitting in the computer room.
With thirty cities on SilentRadio, the cost and problems of
maintaining thirty 56 Kb leased data lines running was getting to
be too much. The answer was to get a satellite channel.
SilentRadio now leases a 56 Kb data channel on K2. At each host
TV station they have a downlink dish. The system has been on
satellite since fall 1988 and besides a small station-keeping
accident in late 1988 when a control operator sent the satellite
about 1,000 miles off course for a few hours, there have been no
problems.
So next time you are waiting in line at the bank and you
see a scrolling message that not only tells you the interest
rate, but the baseball scores, you will be looking at
SilentRadio.
END
--
Julian Macassey, N6ARE jul...@bongo.tele.com Voice: (415) 647-2217