Traffic reports not being received

[Elsecaralan]

Hi All. My 2022 Karoq will not receive 99% of the traffic reports out there. Yes the TP is switched on....I DO get the odd traffic update from local radio, but these are few and far between. The TP function has worked very well on all the previous cars I have had (including two Golfs) so why is it not working on the Karoq? As it IS receiving the odd reprt on local radio the system is out there...why is it not coming through all the time?

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks

[VRT24]

It might be down to the move from FM to DAB. RDS, which carries the traffic announcements, is only on FM and so, I am told, if you listen to DAB rather than FM stations, you won't get the traffic announcements. Plus I guess it also would depend on whether the FM station you listen to uses RDS to send the announcements - and even if they do, how often they transmit them. I may be wrong though!

[MichiF]

Are you sure about RDS and FM band?

 

As far as I know traffic announcements come in via an active Skoda Connect subscription, see https://www.skoda-auto.sk/o-nas/skoda-connect-nove

[langers2k]

TP (traffic programme) which is also known as TA (traffic announcement) is definitely a FM/RDS function and has nothing to do with TMC or online services.

 

The radio will be playing audio whilst also listening to a specific station for a TP flag. When the station sends the TP flag, the radio will automatically switch to the stations audio for the duration of the traffic announcement and then switch back to the previous audio source.

 

Even the older manuals don't say much about TP I'm afraid, it might depend which station you last listened to:

[Woodentop19]

I have asked about this elsewhere - including Skoda CZ tech support but they just shrug their shoulders.

We live in Harrogate and on our last three vehicles - all Passat Estates and the last (2018) had the Discovery Media which is very similar to the Amundsen - it worked perfectly whether we were listening to DAB (mostly) or FM. Now we get TP from Greatest Hits North, and on our way with our caravan to visit daughter in Bath where we stay near Devizes or near Frome, we hear BBC Wilts and BBC Somerset reports. On one return trip on the Kenilworth by-pass we got BBC C&W.

When they are going to broadcast TP on BBC it is incumbent upon the station operator to press a button which sends a signal to London that causes a TP data flag to be set on appropriate transmitter sites. If you are within range of a station radiating that flag your radio will change. I contacted BBC Reception who knew nothing about it - allegedly - but suddenly thereafter we started getting TP around here, mainly from BBC York which has a local transmitter. On previous vehicles whether FM or DAB we got Leeds, York, Tees, and often but not always Sheffield and Humberside. We got some of these for a week or two but it has now slipped away to nothing other than GHR North.

Ergo I don't thing it is necessarily the Infotainment (how I hate that name!) system or the aerials that are the cause, but rather a failure of the provider in many cases.

 

One thing I find annoying with the Amundsen is the inability to fix it to stay on the FM version of any station, it always (sometimes eventually) swings back to DAB. Has anyone found a solution to this habit?

 

Edited 14 November, 2023 by Woodentop19

[Elsecaralan]

So…..do I take it then that this TP traffic programme function SHOULD be working on my Karoq, and that the tale I have been told about the firm providing the service has gone bust is simply not true???????

[langers2k]

4 minutes ago, Elsecaralan said:

So…..do I take it then that this TP traffic programme function SHOULD be working on my Karoq, and that the tale I have been told about the firm providing the service has gone bust is simply not true???????

 

You posted in a topic about TMC, that's traffic report data which your satnav can use to reroute you. The firm who provided this data no longer do via FM which is why people are upset and discussing other options in that thread.

 

At this point, folk got confused about what your problem was and gave you TMC information rather than TP 

 

TP which is voice traffic updates via FM is still working and should work on your Karoq 

 

If they aren't, it could be related to bad/low signal or the last FM station you used doesn't use TP. I'd suggest tuning into whichever station you'd normally use for TP and then switch to whichever audio source you'd normally listen to.

[Elsecaralan]

Thanks, so TP is only on Fm? I seem to remember it being on DAB on my previous cars (Golfs). Will try though…

[Woodentop19]

The idea of RDS originally was that radios using it should have two tuners so that one plays whilst the other searches - but of course that costs too much.

In practice if you are listening to an FM station that has RDS it will stay on that station until the signal gets down to a level that makes the radio start searching. It looks for a station in its alternative frequencies table with a stronger signal and when it finds one it does a quick sniff (takes about 7mS so should not interrupt the current station) to see if the signal is strong and stable enough to warrant a change. If it is it will then take a long sniff of the station to get the station identity and if it is the same station transmitting the same programme it will change. This longer sniff can take up to 300mS and may cause a dropout, but usually it is only a few tens of milliseconds so causes no break. If none of these parameters are met it will continue searching.

RDS radios used to have an option to listen to the full found station code or just part of it. IIRC BBCR2 is C2C2 for example. If the option is <not> set to full code read then any local station in the signal area will be considered to be the same. For example BBC Radio Leeds (which was our local station) has about five sites, Radio York has 2, Radio Humberside has 1 and Radio Sheffield has 3. If the full check was not set the radio would consider ALL of these stations to be the same and would just switch to the strongest signal it could find. If the fill check was set then it would search for the full code and stay with the same station as it started from.

Any reader please ask if you want to know why this seemingly stupid system was used.

[Woodentop19]

10 minutes ago, Elsecaralan said:

Thanks, so TP is only on Fm? I seem to remember it being on DAB on my previous cars (Golfs). Will try though…

No TP is only FM. If there is a TP bulletin coming up the DAB data stream will carry the information and force the radio to check the FM station to see if it can be received and if so if the signal is strong enough to use. If both criteria are met it forces a change to FM (irrespective of what your screen display may indicate) for the duration of the bulletin whence it reverts to DAB (always assuming the station remembers to switch the TP flag off when complete!!)

Edited 14 November, 2023 by Woodentop19