Thanks for the answer Jan!
I've followed the RDS development for a while, and indeed it's removed from the new specifications. But to my knowledge there's nothing to replace it yet, so I just thought why not to transmit that until something else is actually being developed. Yes, it might be completely useless and probably no listener uses it. But at least as a monitoring standpoint, it's actually quite nice to see the start time of the current program (my home tuner shows it)
Now looking at the firmware changelog, seems like it was removed from v. 2.2a onwards. Would there be any way to downgrade the encoders to test the older versions?
If that's not possible, I think I can do it by moving ECC/LIC to UDG1/UDG2, along with the correct PIN set by a scheduled script to 4th block. Already tried that and it kind of works. Just need to somehow get the day/time being converted to HEX automatically.
About the deprecated features, same goes for the M/S which is also dropped. But unlike PIN, some older receivers might be affected by that. I have several Blaupunkts from the 90s/early 2000s that change the tone according to it (MS=0 cuts the bass and increases mid range, MS=1 with normal sound). And have also seen some real world examples with older cars, after Worldcast removed that feature from their encoders (widely used here), with the M/S bit being stuck =0 for now on many stations. While it can be usually disabled on the radio's settings, many drivers won't know about that.. Luckily this is not an issue with any recent tuners from the last decade or two, but might affect a few older ones.
Hope that it will be kept on the Pira encoders in the future.. We are also using that dynamically according to the program content.
