Sirius Traffic
 

Does Sirius traffic work with the BMW navigation system?

so... does it?

Not in the I-Bus generation of cars. I am not sure about the I-Drive cars, though.

I guess the DVD maps that are usable in the MK 4 system can also be used in the MOST DVD drives?

The reason I am asking is that I have a 2009 map DVD, that when I installed the disk into the Nav computer, I gained the greyed out TRAFFIC INFO line on the Nav screen - if there is no use for the traffic info in the i-bus vehicles, why would the disk contain the traffic info on the disk?

Yes, the "DVD High" map disk is also only used in the E65/E66 MOST iDrive nav system. The rest of the MOST iDrive cars use the "DVD Professional" version of the disk.

Also, note that the Euro cars have a traffic master system that does work with the nav system and has even back to the CD versions of the disks. So, they all use the same hardware. This was based on traffic data broadcast over FM.

so, the OEM Sirius module's paid traffic subscription would not feed the info into the nav system? what a pity... :(

Traffic on E53?
 

couple days ago I was driving a friend's 2008 X3, with NO Nav, and just a regular radio with a single CD slot. Naturally, being noisy, I noticed that the radio had the RDS and PTY features lit up on the far right segment of the display. The RDS had an asterisk (*) next to it and the PTY did not.

I put the radio into the service mode and went through the region options: the options were for USA, CANADA, JAPAN, OCE and EUROPE.

I put the radio into EUROPE mode, and the radio started to pick up even frequencies along with odd ones - in the US only odd ones are licensed to the radio stations...

As I was scrolling through the stations, I noticed that some stations picked up a "TP" next to station frequency number, and in the far right segment where the RDS and PTY were, the PTY went away and TP was in it's place.

This car is not equipped with a navigation, so I could not test my new theory, but I am wondering, if there were a Nav present, would it be able to utilize that TP information broadcast on radio (obviously ClearChannel stations) or not... In other words, a US radio that is put in Euro mode might (or might not) be able to pick up the traffic info... if the pattern standard is the same (like GSM vs CDMA vs TDMA in the cell phone business)

Which brings me to couple of questions -

1) the Sirius broadcasts Traffic info to paid subscribers, If I had the TP available on the Nav disk and had the paid subscription, would the MK4 pull the traffic info?

2) my current radio in X5 4.8 does not have EUROPE setting available, only CANADA, JAPAN, OCE and USA... If this radio had the EUROPE settings and would pull the TP information from the ClearChannel stations, would that be fed into the Nav?

Interesting, the radio in '06 model is BM53, and it does not have the EUROPE mode... My '02 radio was put into EUROPE mode in Moscow ( no TP info there), so I was wondering if the "newer" radio can have that EUROPE mode with both odd and even frequencies... maybe with updated firmware???

Is your actual radio a BM53 or a BM 54?

it is BM53

TP does not give you traffic data for your Nav. With TP enabled, when a station is broadcasting spoken traffic news, the radio will pause the CD and flip to the tuner, and increase the volume if it is attenuated for the duration of the traffic broadcast. It can also retune the radio temporarily to another station for the period of the broadcast. After the news is complete, it will restore the previous settings.

For nav traffic data, you need RDS-TMC.