Hacker News Reader

Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

My radio in my 2005 Chrysler Crossfire has a weird bug where if I set it to 92.5 KQRS it works fine for about a minute and then suddenly changes station to some country station ~105 that I don’t have as any sort of preset. It’s done this since I bought the car in 2010 and never had a similar behavior with any other stations. It’s really bizarre.

View on HN

Sounds like an RDSB issue where the station is broadcasting an alternate frequency AF and the radio is switching to, because the field strength of that AF is stronger than the one you are coming from. There are three fixes:

* You enable "LOCAL" mode, this should ignore those AFs broadcasted by stations which would switch to another station broadcasting a different program (it's actually more complicated, for brevity simplified). Not all head units HU offer this setting.

* You disable the AF-feature of your HU.

* KQRS should stop broadcasting this AF

where did you learn this?

I am a licensed ham radio operator. But besides that from studying absolutely broken junk chinese head units.

Not saying they are all bad but most of them

To add another bit of anecdata, if either station has their PI mis-configured, you can get handoff without being in the AF list. 1st and 3rd character matching rings a bell.

Seen it happen in the UK with RDS and head units tuning to the higher powered (mis-configured) station.

I have a Ford Ranger 2020 and I never listen to radio, always listen on Bluetooth. For some reason it switches to an AM station (that I never listen to) from my Bluetooth and shows a TA icon (even when TA is toggled off, and it's not even used in my country, and the AM station has nothing to do with TA).

After reading this I started to wonder if it might be something similar/related.

I even thought of removing the antenna as I never use radio anyway. Have you done anything about your issue that you can recommend?

I'm certain the TA toggle is broken in my 2019 Hyundai i30N. Disabled every radio-related setting, somehow an FM station managed to force the system to switch to it from Android Auto every 5 minutes. TA is also not used in my country. Infuriating.

Might be a bug involving the station's broadcast of and/or the stereo's support for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_frequency

Interesting… I wonder if maybe they are wrongly broadcasting an alternate frequency. I wonder if there’s an easy way to inspect the radio stations “metadata”.

I have done some basic fiddling with SDR but am not at all competent.

> then suddenly changes station to some country station

My God, the horror.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com