Phones should have FM radio again (as an emergency safety feature)
Radio access could be a critical safety feature in the years ahead.
I didn't even realize Qualcomm removed the built in FM radio from their chips. Huh.
i hate how every quality of life feature now has to be pitched as essential safety, instead of simply being there because it's good. can't have quality anymore unless it's literally necessary
Meh, I haven't listened to FM in years. It's just not a feature as far as I'm concerned.
FM is good in theory, but I stopped listening over a decade ago due to the sheer overwhelming advertising. Sometimes it felt like I’d go half an hour or more without any music to listen to. It’s just not worth it
Maybe the 3.5mm jack and headphones could double as an antenna!
The Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Lite does that. If I’m not mistaken, some budget phones nowadays still do that.
Even if they don’t, as long as there’s a headphone jack, it might be possible to add good FM Radio support with NextRadio/Spirit2. You might need to root your phone, though.
Pretty much every phone used to do that
I think this satire whooshed most everybody who replied.
The last phone I had with FM radio was a Sony Ericsson slider from 2009
There were a few Motorola smartphones that did that actually. It worked quite well tbh.
Analogue radio is getting shut down in favor of digital broadcasts, so I doubt this would truly be helpful in many areas.
Aren't digital radio less reliable than analog FM broadcasts? Would digital broadcasts be as useful during an emergency?
I don't really know that much about the subject, so I'd like to learn a bit more.
It's not necessarily clear cut for one being more reliable than the other. FM broadcasts are analog and more likely to be subject to interference (interference will directly impact what you hear, but not as badly as with AM radio) and as the signal falls off it will be harder to hear. Digital radio will be perfectly clear as long as you get a signal, but may become distorted or just cut out if the signal is weak and there are too many errors in the data being received. There will be error correction for digital radio signals, but eventually you won't be able to receive reliably enough that it will fail. If I had to guess, assuming all of the equipment is working, digital is probably going to be more reliable than analog radio in more conditions and over a longer distance, and it probably needs less bandwidth in general because you could compress the stream.
Germany barely has FM anymore - it's due to be shut off in the next few years.
Phones should have FM radio not as an emergency feature, but as a method of banging out the tunes. I wanna jam out at a campsite with no downloaded music and no cell service.
The chances of getting FM reception at this campsite aren't good.
A man can dream, though. A man can dream.
bro are you 12 AM.... wait we arent talking about AM?
my phone has an fm radio but it needs wired headphones
That's because the FM signal needs an antenna that's longer than you can fit in your phone
Ah, the elusive "C o u r a g e" port.
While not a physical radio, a Linux phone such as the Librem 5 in conjunction with an RTL-SDR dongle and external antenna may be a good candidate for a mobile software-defined radio (SDR) transceiver.
SDR frameworks such as GNUradio or REDHAWK are well-established by this point. Newer versions of REDHAWK are designed to run on CentOS/Rocky Linux, however, and they don't (AFAIK) come with a mobile-friendly UI.
I do know that there are some web-based SDR tools in the wild. I'm not very familiar with them, their system requirements/capabilities/limitations, but they could be worth a look to jump-start a Progressive Web App for mobile devices.
SDR is neat but will be awfully power-inefficient, and if one is thinking of an emergency situation where one has to receive information and even the cell system is down, I would wager that being concerned about power usage on a cell phone is probably also going to be a factor.
My sister and some friends once were out in the forest and managed to get get themselves lost, out of sight of civilization but within cell range. The very first thing that the sheriff told them to do was to turn off all but one cell phone that they had with them, to maximize their battery lifetime. I suspect that that's probably standard advice from law enforcement, and the situation there was a lot-less of a major emergency than a loss of the cell network would be.
Or basically any Android with OTG support. There's a bunch of SDR software also available on Android. SDR++, SatDump, SDRAngel, Welle.io, Dump1090,...
But obviously, a proper GNU+Linux phone will do better.
you can listen to encrypted radio transmissions this way with the correct codes and software of course
stop sharing police technology bro /,$
I keep a small solar/crank generator/USB-powered radio in my car. Which can provide USB power, act as a light, and also, in a pinch, charge my cellphone. You can get these starting at about $13 on Amazon.
That's not quite as good as having one with everyone, but as long as you're within walking distance of your car, you can probably get to it. It also has some benefits:
I saw a YouTube video where someone was testing crank powered phone chargers and they weren't able to get enough juice to ever power the phones. Have you tested it for that purpose?
I got one after the crazy storms we had over the summer. Had an old cube Nola radio that ran on a 9volt we had growing up but that has long since been lost
I also remember some guy at a think tank in the US that covers cyberwarfare saying that one of the surprises was that Russia didn’t try to disable Ukraine’s cell network, either via cyberwarfare or via conventional means; taking out the cell network would do a lot to dick up a country.
Russia didn't disable the cell network because they were using cell phones to coordinate their forces (as presumably they didn't have proper radios).
Yeah. It's not like Russia isn't into dicking up Ukraine.
Russia doesn't want ukraine or its people: Russia just wants what it probably calls 'western Russian' Farmland; and some poor people to work it.
signal fires it is then
Some phone today do have that. Service providers like to disable the feature though
My last couple of phones have definitely had it (Motorola).
They would have to put the headphone jacks back in since the wires were the antenna
Secret real benefit discovered!
When my phone dies it will be hard to pick a replacement. The 3.5mm jack is a core feature.
Zenfone maybe?
they should have never removed it in the first place.
There’s another type of radio that could save lives if implemented in smartphones. In the United States, the NOAA runs a network of radio towers that broadcast up-to-the-minute weather reports and automated alerts, which are specifically designed to stay running during tornadoes and other emergencies. The signals are broadcasted on 162.400 – 162.550 MHz, above the FM band, allowing the signals to travel much farther than regular radio or cell networks.
Higher frequencies travel shorter distances and permeate through buildings and trees less, so 162.4 - 162.55 MHz is going to be worse than the rest of the FM band (but still better than cell frequencies).
It's not that straight forward. And in a practical sense 162MHz is hardly significantly higher than 100MHz.
Apologies, I accidentally missed off the end of the quote, the bit I was commenting on:
The signals are broadcasted on 162.400 – 162.550 MHz, above the FM band, allowing the signals to travel much farther than regular radio or cell networks.
I agree that it isn't much different. However it is objectively worse than regular FM radio, not better as the article claimed.
... my last phone had fm radio that didn't need headphones to work or even internet. My new phone needs headphones to work.... why are y'all buying expensive phones with no features???!
No headphone socket on all the cool phones now, remember?
So now the manufacturer needs to squeeze a FM antenna into the phone and they juuuust used "lack of space" as the bullshit excuse for removing the headphone socket on this new model so they'd much prefer to pretend that FM radio didn't exist thanks.
Germany got it removed for more than 6 years ago. My last capable phone was the Samsung S3.
I'd say AM radio is a better safety feature for Australians at least, since the ABC broadcast emergency warnings via their AM stations.
I'm still mad that they got rid of the headphone jack since I can't access my radio anymore.
iPhones never had the feature anyway but they should add it, at least through the USB-C port on their newest devices.
Or you could...ya know...just use the emergency safety features.
This is a ploy by broadcasters. Just like "think of the children!!" - they want more listeners to toss more ads at. They've been tossing this article around for a bit now, under the guise of "safety", because they are losing listeners.
What emergency safety features? Making a 911 call?
The last time a major weather event happened it was really hard to get updated information, the power was out, internet was down. I only had an old battery powered radio that still had an FM tuner.
As time passes fewer and fewer devices have the FM tuners, and it's less and less likely I have spare working batteries for them. A phone on the other hand, I'm already setup with backup batteries I can use to recharge it, I don't need to be as "prepared" to be able to stay up to date if it could still pick up the radio
i dont understand. what do the broadcasters get out of this? is it just exposure about the existence of radio? u can always not use the radio in your phone
FM radio has been removed from most phones for a while now. They want it added back. Having an FM radio in the device for "emergencies", means that now phone producers will be required to have working FM radio capabilities, and if they have that much - it's a no-brainer for them because they're required to have it, to just add the FM radio app to the device by default. THAT is what broadcasters get out of this. They don't actually give a shit about using FM capabilities for emergencies - it's just a convenient way for broadcasters to force phone manufacturers to add the capability back when they don't really care to.
What FM broadcasters don't have an internet radio presence? Arguably that's more profitable from an ads standpoint since you can get analytics about who's listening, vs FM radio where you're just broadcasting to whoever's out there.
