I have been leaving my radio info with RDS activated. In the preset menu, it always leaves random words as the station's title and I never know what they are. I haven't been able to figure out any regular pattern with how the title is updated either. Can someone explain how RDS works and what I am missing?

 

RDS is dependent on what the radio station wants to display. I don't listen to the Radio in my E60 since there are plenty of other options but in my '99 Land Rover I've found differences in what's displayed between DJs on the same station. So, YMMV.

 

The radio station is free to use their RDS station identifier for whatever they want. They can scroll data across it if they want. Some use it to show traffic info, weather, news. the name of the song being played, or other announcements. How much control you have over it is up to the designer of the radio itself. You can on some devices disable the scrolling info and display only ever the name of the station. I don't think our iDrive/Radios offer much control. So those random words you're seeing might well be the song titles or could be from some random announcement or news headline.