Introduced in 2004, the Radio magazine Innovative Product Awards were developed to honor excellence in new product development in the radio industry. The awards demonstrate the talent and commitment of the people in every aspect of development at each company, from concept through sales. The entrants were listed in the 2005 Radio magazine Buyers Guide that was included in the December 2004 issue.

Manufacturers submitted products in several categories, and the winners were selected through an online form by you, the Radio magazine reader. The results were tallied at the end of February, and the winners were presented with their awards at NAB2005. Over the next few months, we will profile each of these winning products.

The 2005 Innovative Product Award entries will be listed in the Radio magazine 2006 Buyers Guide, which will be released in December.

The Radio Experience handles the data that is displayed on RBDS and HD Radio receivers.

Data & Audio Storage

Broadcast Electronics The Radio Experience

A system of hardware and software, The Radio Experience provides data for use with RBDS, HD Radio and webcasts. It is designed to manage all radio data requirements and integrates with the various systems in a station.

The Now Playing feature, which is available in a standard and Now Playing Plus version, feeds station branding, program information, traffic and weather and content-associated text ads and promotions. Now Playing provides program-associated data (PAD) text management for FM RBDS, HD Radio main and secondary channels and station websites. Now Playing Plus adds an Internet connection to the The Radio Experience Data Center. Both software packages include a utility to multiplex multiple RBDS data signals into a RS-232 stream to conserve STL bandwidth. This can be extracted at the transmitter site using The Radio Experience RDI Accelerated RBDS Generators or third-party RBDS equipment.

On the hardware side, the RDI 10 and RDI 20 RBDS generators can simultaneously feed RDS data to two analog transmitters and an HD Radio exciter. One RS-232 data channel can be looped through multiple RDI units, with each encoder configured to pull data from an appropriate channel.

The RDSX RDS Upgrade is an add-on board for Inovonics or Audemat-Aztec RBDS generators to add the data channel multiplexing capability and TCP/IP connectivity.

The Now Playing software updates a station's website.