A Question About The Radio (pty, Af & Ast)

Juniper · January 25, 2007

I have recently bought a GS 300 with a 14-speaker Mark Levinson DVD front loader system. It's a fantastic system, but I have been a bit frustrated about the manual that came with the vehicle.

I don't know if the sound system differs from country to country, but can someone please help me to understand what the three buttons at the bottom of the screen are: when the radio is on, PTY, AF & AST come up. I know that it has to do with RDS features, but can't figure it out. My manual doesnt mention anything about these buttons!

I know that there is a way to get a traffic report (for instance) to over-ride anything else that you are listening to, but can't figure out how to set it and I am sure that one of these buttons are for that purpose.

There is a TA button on the cassette player that seems to be linked into these three options on the touch screen that come up when the radio is on as well.

Any help would be hugely appreciated. Better still - if anyone knows where to find a softcopy of the manual that might explain it, that would be a great help!

Many thanks

Rillo · January 25, 2007

AF: Alternate Frequencies. This allows a receiver to re-tune to a different frequency providing the same station when the first signal becomes too weak (e.g. when moving out of range). This is often utilised in car stereo systems.

EON: Enhanced Other Networks. Allows the receiver to monitor other stations for traffic broadcasts.

PTY: Program Type. This coding of up to 31 pre-defined programme types – e.g. (in Europe): PTY1 News,

PTY6 Drama, PTY11 Rock music – allows users to find similar programming by genre. PTY31 seems to be reserved for emergency announcements in the event of natural disasters or other major calamities. This allows you to search for ROCK stations, news etc.

TA, TP: Travel Announcements, Traffic Program. The receiver can often be set to pay special attention to this flag and e.g stop the tape or retune to receive a Traffic bulletin. The TP flag is used to allow the user to find only those stations that regularly broadcast traffic bulletins whereas the TA flag is used to stop the tape or raise the volume during a traffic bulletin.

TMC: Traffic Message Channel. Demands a RDS-TMC decoder.

AST switches to FM-AST or MW-AST band, searches for the 6 strongest transmitters and stores them

in the AST programme preset memory. In FM, duplication of PI codes will be avoided.

Hope this helps :)

Juniper · January 25, 2007

Rillo thanks so much for the help. I feel a bit of a turkey, because it seems pretty obvious now. I will play around in the morning!

Thanks again

Rillo · January 25, 2007

it's only obvious when you know the answer :)

oldcro · January 25, 2007

it's only obvious when you know the answer :)

My thanks as well Rillo, it's great when things are explained in a language us humans can understand (that's assuming you can read basic english but are confused by gobblygook) :D