Auto Switching Radio Stations

Today's idea addresses a problem that only some people will have with some stations in some locations.

Certain smaller stations will have multiple frequencies depending on your exact location relative to your local urban center. The station is served on different frequencies in different areas. The North suburbs might have 102.1 while downtown might have the station on 95.5 for example.

These tend to be, in my experience, smaller less popular stations.

The result is that you can be driving along and have the station die out or become unclear. If you wish to continue listening to the station it requires you to switch over to the other station. This can be problematic if you stumbled across the station while surfing for something to listen to (and thus do not know that they have multiple frequencies), or if the station used more than two frequencies so that you need to figure out which one will end up being most clear.

Digital radio signals can let the radio know the station name and name of the song and artist currently playing. It would also be possible for the signal to have alternative frequency information embedded into it. If the signal detected noise from static (something your radio can already do, this is how it autotunes), it would quickly check the alternative frequencies to see if any of them were clearer.

This could also be used with syndicated radio shows that are being hosted on multiple stations. If the signal of the station you were listening on grew too weak, it could automatically check the signal of other stations hosting the show at that time.

This would increase the cost of the radio (just like digital radios cost more). It would need a bit more hardware to figure out how to flip frequencies, and it would likely need multiple tuners (to allow it to check the other frequencies without interrupting what you are listening to). However, these costs would not be too great. They would also lay some of the hardware groundwork for another one of my ideas, a radio Tivo.

Ultimately, as I said earlier, this would only be useful some of the time for some people. However, when dealing with these types of small stations, retuning into them is very annoying. I feel that the people who DO have to deal with this would greatly appreciate the functionality, and it would almost certainly help the listenership of these small stations.