I have a 2016 Lariat. Sync 3, I believe. If not, the picture I'm posting might give it away. When playing the fm radio, the stations I listen to put up song titles etc as the song plays. This morning all my stations simply say Sister.
Any idea why or how that could happen? I'll explain why this is so weird shortly.

 

I had a good friend pass away early this week from a massive stroke she had last Friday. Vera Hamilton. She was 61 years old. She was very involved in our church and operated the video system while I ran the audio side. We worked together there for at least a decade, along with just being good friends. Her funeral will be this coming Saturday at the church. Bethel Baptist in Pleasant Grove Alabama.

Vera's nickname and the name everbody knew her by was.....Sister.

I got in the truck this morning and fired it up. About 6:25am. Beautiful morning. I put the roof back and rolled the drivers window down and headed up the street. The radio was on but down low enough I couldn't hear it while I was moving. Perfect. I drove over to the freeway and got on, headed to the office. I glanced down and noticed the readout on my radio simply said "Sister". Thinking how weird that was, I turned the radio up to see what the song Sister was. I found a men's "health" clinic commercial on. I nearly wrecked. I took my phone out and snapped a picture. The time on the radio was 6:35. I rolled along a bit and took another pic at 6:44. The another at 6:52, when I parked at the office. I came back out at 8:02 and it was still there and I discovered it was on every station. I took the above pictures. 30 minutes later the radio readout was back to normal.

I'm at a loss here.

 

 

Some would call it a quirk in SYNC 3... others may see it as a final farewell from a good friend. I personally prefer to think the latter....

 

I'm with you.

I'm also kinda weirded out, if I'm honest.

 

Sooooo, I'm supposing from the nearly 250 thread views and just one reply, that there is NO way to program specific titles into the FM radio readout, from the truck. And then remove them.

 

My advice is...don't look for an answer. Believe what you want to believe about why it happened. Finding out what really caused it (some programming glitch with Sync, or a Ford techie doing some tweaks, or whatever), may be disappointing. You have a great, unexplainable (at least for now) story. You can make it a family story for years to come leaving it unexplained.

And maybe even someone on here that truly knows a logically reasonble explaination, will bite their tongue to allow you to wonder about the possibility of "what if?"....

Just my thoughts here.

I wish you, and the family of your friend comfort and solace.

 

do a master reset

 

It went back to normal after approx 2 hours. I'm using 2 hours because I didn't look at it until I'd been driving a few minutes but I do know it went off at some point after 8:02am. Was it displaying "Sister" when I first fired the truck at about 6:25? I don't know.

 

Is it possible that Vera was so well know in the community that the local radio stations got together & did this as a tribute to her? Although the RDS data is automated, I imagine the station engineer has the capability to manually enter what they want.