I've noticed with my new headunit it has HD radio. What is this? When we came back from Toronto in March, and were passing through Chicago listening to the radio I noticed that the name of the song that was being played showed up on the deck. Also there is a function called Traffic Information, havent seen this function in action yet though.

hard drive i believe is what it stands for. a new thing that actually stores information on the unit..

Yea, those are pretty awesome. My parents Explorer radio does that with showing the names and give traffic reports. But have no idea what HD means.

i read in my manual to mine and it stands for hard drive when it is a sony

Sorry to bust your bubble, but HD means High Definition [radio]. Your reciever is HD ready, which means that you can easily add an external interaface that will allow you to recieve the new broadcasts as they become available.

If you haven't heard of HD radio, it'* basically the same as sattelite radio (quality wise, being digital and all) but it'* broadcast like current radio, from towers.

The feature on your radio that allows you to recieve FM radio station info and display names and the such is called RDS, for Radio Data System. This allows current FM stations to broadcase to you not only music, but the station'* name, advertisements, song titles, whatever they want. It'* sorta neat, actually.

My Denon Home reciever has RDS, and i've never seen anything on it..

Drive to the cities, and put it on 93X. They have the most animated RDS broadcasts I've seen. Of course, I haven't seen too many cause I live in iowa, lol. The stations here just display their name, if anything :(

Alright that clarifies a few things. The manual is kind of worthless in explaining what some of the features are.

true true

I never even knew my blaupunkt had it until i went to a big city.