95_993

Okay, so this is a very weird one.
I am in the Boston area. Every time I drive to the airport or within downtown Boston, my stereo randomly switches to a latin music station. What is very odd, it that the station starts independently from whatever source I am listening to (AM, FM, CD....yes even CD). When I toggle the source button it returns to my normal programming like CD. I might expect a strong FM signal to over power at station if I were listening to FM, but to over power/switch sources??? Bizarre. Only happens within 5 miles of Boston (so far).

phatz

Its an Easter Egg from the engineers at subsidiary SEAT ...where PCMs are produced in Spain
Just enjoy Livin' La Vida Loca

thesteve

Ha. I had a similar issue with specific symptoms.
While listening to 97.1 MHz, the radio would intermittently switch to an Indian language radio station.
Once it would go into this mode, it would keep doing it every 45 seconds or so despite switching it back.
So I'd fix it only to have it continually switch to the Indian music every minute or so. IIRC the display still showed 97.1.
Never had an issue where it would switch between sources though.
This issue is happily gone with my new Android radio, which I love. But I recall finding other members with the same issue when I did a search way back when.
It did also seem to be geographically correlated.
Oh, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I had to reset the preset every time or the Indian station stayed in place of 97.1.

theprf

There is some wizardry in the PCM that is it detects a station that's broadcasting a PlayTYpe (PTY) that you have favorited, it will switch to that station automatically. The PTY is broadcast on the RDS system. The PCM has 2 FM tuners, one is always scanning for RDS and Traffic Info and the other one is the one that we tune in to listen to stations.
Somewhere in those maze-like menus there is a screen that lets you favorite certain PTY's. I presume that they can be un-favorited too. There is also a factory reset in there somewhere.

phatz

Red dot or Feather ?

95_993

Great info...thanks

touareg

Yep you have a setting that tunes the radio to either the strongest version of the same station (AF), or when a station is weak tunes to a new station based on Pop or Country (PTY) or whatever your favorite music type is. The traffic announce (TA) feature is another one, it supposed to listen for like a weather alert or traffic, switch to that station, give you the news and switch back. Far as I know this was never supported in the US. My personal theory is random bits get mis-interpreted but most likely the station is not configured correct and is broadcasting extra crap.Some Supported Some not in the USA.
Alternate Frequency (AF/EON)
Traffic Announcement / Traffic Program Indication (TA/TP)
TMC - Traffic Information via Traffic Message Channel
Station name, Program Type, Radio Text (PS/PTY/PTYN/RT)
Specific user data forwarding (TDC)
Radio Paging (RP) - Paging via RDS
EWS - Emergency Warning System
RDS control information
Program Identification and Extended Country Code (PI und ECC)
Program Type (PTY)
Traffic Program Identification (TP)
Traffic Announcement Identification (TA)
Music/Speech Switch (M/S)
Decoder Identification (DI) and Dynamic PTY Indicator (PTYI)
Alternative Frequencies (AF)
Program Item Number (PIN)
Group Sequence (GS)