FM radio is typically tuned using a
superheterodyne receiver. This type of receiver
contains two main sections. First the signal from
the antenna is amplified, filtered and translated
down to a fixed intermediate frequency. The
second part of this receiver provides further
filtering and demodulates this fixed intermediate
frequency signal.[2][3]
In order to change stations the front end of the
superhetrodyne receiver is retuned to a new
frequency. This translates a different station onto
the same fixed intermediate frequency which is
then processed exactly the same way as any other
station would be.
In order to gather RDS information from all
tunable stations an analog system would need to
do one of the following: retune very rapidly,
sequentially update stations waiting for at least 5
seconds on each station, or contain numerous
superheterodyne receivers. The RDS data changes
every 0.84 milliseconds (ms). This means that the
receiver system must be tuned to every station we
are interested in within less than a millisecond.
Some commercially available analog FM receivers
have a seek/tune time as high as 60ms and thus
cannot accomplish this timing requirement.[4]
Waiting for the 5 seconds to collect all the RDS
data before it repeats could work well for 2-3
stations where the station data is updated only
every 10-15 seconds. However, it is common to
have over 10 tunable stations in a given location.
This introduces refresh times approaching one
minute which no longer has the desired effect of
being real time. Multiple parallel FM receivers
could be used. This would require much more
hardware as well as create a potential restriction on
the number of stations that could be processed at
one time.