If you listen to The Public’s Radio on an HD Radio-equipped receiver (look for the stylized little HD logo on the radio) then you may have noticed that in late February our logo would appear on your radio when you tuned to 89.3FM.

This technology is called “Artist Experience“, or AE. Since HD Radio is, at its core, just 96kbps of data being pushed from the transmitter to your radio, some of those bits can be allocated to send something other than audio. In the case of AE, we’re limited to a JPG of 200×200 pixels and 24kb in size. But that’s enough to have a nice little logo displayed.

Technically, AE allows for images to be pushed to your radio display in real time. So, for example, a music station can push out an image of an album cover, or a headshot of the artist, whenever a new track starts playing. The software to do that is called “middleware” and it’s a little spendy, and since we’re just a news station, it didn’t seem worth the cash. What would be push? Headshots of Dave Fallon and Torey Malatia? 🙂

The specific AE software is called Multiport Synchronous/Asynchronous Client (MSAC), which is written in Java and runs on the HD Radio Importer computer at the transmitter site; ours is made by our transmitter manufacturer, Nautel, and is called the MultiCastPlus.

We have gotten a report of one oddity: a listener who was very clearly tuned to WGBH 89.7FM, complete with WGBH’s metadata, but our The Public’s Radio logo was displayed. I guess some radios will “buffer” the MSAC/AE image and if you tune to a station without an AE image, it’ll keep showing the buffered image. Not ideal, but not much we can do about it – it depends entirely on how the radio manufacturer designs their radio’s software.

If you want to get a radio that shows AE, mostly you have to buy a car that comes with a multi-function display of some kind, and also can receive HD Radio signals. There is one tabletop radio, though: the SPARC SHD-T750. You can see a picture of it above!