HDFM

Displays live weather, traffic, album artwork, and song/station data received from HD Radio stations

Overview

hdfm is a Python script designed to process data broadcasted by iHeartRadio HD Radio stations and display it in real time. This data includes traffic and weather maps, as well as album/station art and station/song details.

This script sources its data from another program nrsc5, which was developed to decode HD Radio signals using an inexpensive RTL-SDR receiver. More information can be found on nrsc5 here. If you haven't heard of an RTL-SDR receiver before or do not own one, I would highly recommend purchasing one. There are many unique projects that can be done with them and they are extremely inexpensive.

Some potential uses of this script include receiving weather and traffic data while off the grid (but near a radio station) or creating a custom car navigation system.

Keep in mind this program will ONLY work with iHeartRadio stations. If you encounter any problems, just open an issue and I'll do my best to help.

Packages

• Python 3 (preferably 3.6 or higher)
• python3-tk (Default with some installations; others need it manually installed)
• nrsc5 (installation instructions available here)

Libraries

• Pillow (PIL fork, pip3 install Pillow)

Other Requirements

An RTL-SDR dongle which can be found here.

Usage:

Usage:  [OPTIONS]  frequency

 Option              Meaning
 -h, --help          Show this message
 -c <program>        HD Radio program, for stations with subchannels (default = 0)
 -p <ppm>            PPM error correction (default = 0)
 -s <dir>            Directory to save weather and traffic images to (default = none)
 -l <null>           Show logging information
 -a <null>           Display album/station art

Examples:

Tune to 104.5 MHz:

 $ ./hdfm.py 104.5

Tune to 104.5 MHz, display album/station artwork, and save all received maps to saves/:

 $ ./hdfm.py -a -s saves 104.5

Tune to 104.5 MHz, set the ppm correction to 48, and decode HD program 2 (HD2)

 $ ./hdfm.py -p 48 -c 1 104.5

Compatible Stations

A list of nearby HD Radio stations can be found by entering your zip code at this website: https://hdradio.com/stations

A list of all compatible iHeartRadio stations in the US can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radio_stations_owned_by_iHeartMedia

The station must be HD and operated by iHeartRadio for this program to function properly.