RDS Coder Emulator Applied for Didactic Purposes

Abstract

Didactic emulation of complex electronic systems is a widely applied practice which allows a simple and efficient way of teaching electronical and electrical engineering issues. The Radio Data System (RDS) is a low bit rate transmission of additional information attached to the FM broadcasting channels in the 87.5 to 108MHz band. The RDS system standardizes various types of information useful to identify the radio channel, traffic information, automatic reception on favorable reception frequencies, and more. This paper presents a virtual emulation of such electronic elements, created using the LabView environment. The use of the LabView programming environment makes it very easy because of the predefined functions in the program libraries. In addition to these functions, there are also some modules that perform basic operations specific to the FM transmission. Such a module is AM modulator and demodulator, to which we only attach the carrier frequency and the modulated signal. A big impediment in RDS encoder implementation was the implementation of the delay block by half of the tact. It highlights the operation of the RDS encoder and decoder by illustrating the waveforms of each block in the RDS signal processing chain, highlighting the effect of the noise input on the transmission channel on the RDS signal decoding by graphically illustrating the evolution of the BER during the transmission. It brings great ease in implementation due to the predefined functions in the program libraries and provides a user-friendly interface that facilitates easy use of the application by students in the lab.