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.
I know I’m a minority opinion but I like having the option. It’s like IR blasters, SD cards, removable batteries… things I didn’t use all the time but sometimes come very much in handy.
Return of the IR blaster would be absolutely killer for me. I LOVED that feature on my old Samsungs, especially because my SO has a tendency to just… leave the remote places
The problem is that you have to make the line somewhere. Sure, one small feature is kinda miniscule, but you could easily name dozens, and that starts eating into costs and/or other actually useful features fast.
There’s also the fact that when you have a “swiss army knife” of phones chances are it doesn’t do anything really well.
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.
There were a few Motorola smartphones that did that actually. It worked quite well tbh.
All phones I’ve ever owned did that. The radio app would tell you to plug your earphones.
I had one that didn’t require it. I think Prestigio PAP4044 DUO. It could pick up almost nothing, but almost at least wasn’t nothing.
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.
I’d argue it is still less reliable since the channels are multiplexed. This means a failure of single transmitter takes down all of those channels at once. Secondly, digital radio often uses SFN to save bandwidth and power. This however means that a single misconfigured/malfunctioning transmitter can cause destructive interference in a wider area.
This is happening in my area for a few months now. A new low power DAB+ transmitter was added into the network. I was able to get a poor but still usable signal before, while now the signal is strong, there’s too much interference for the error correction to compensate. Someone on a forum from this area has mentioned the same happening to him after the addition of this transmitter, when trying to tune DAB+ in his car.
But sure, if the technology works, it can be better.
In a life or death situation it would be easier to construct an FM transmitter/receiver than a digital counterpart.
AM transmitters / receivers are far easier to construct than FM ones, though. If I was in an emergency situation where I couldn’t communicate with anybody I think I might be able to at least make an AM receiver, even if there aren’t very many components around… But I would need a reference to have any clue how to approach an FM one, and you’d definitely need more components available. Frequency modulation is quite a bit more complicated. If you want to transmit, CW is probably your best hope?
Realistically, though, almost anybody in an emergency situation is doomed if the only thing that would save them is building any kind of radio. It’s not a skill set that most people have… Which I guess is why you might advocate for everybody’s phones to be able to act as FM receivers in case that’s the best way to get an emergency broadcast, because then they would have a device that’s capable of it on hand. You’re probably better off if you have a dedicated emergency radio, especially if you might lose power for an extended period of time, though.
Not in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio
A 400 kHz wide channel is required for HD FM analog-digital hybrid transmission, making its adoption problematic outside of North America. In the United States, FM channels are spaced 200 kHz apart as opposed to 100 kHz elsewhere. Furthermore, long-standing FCC licensing practice, dating from when receivers had poor adjacent-channel selectivity, assigns stations in geographically overlapping or adjacent coverage areas to channels separated by (at least) 400 kHz. Thus most stations can transmit carefully designed digital signals on their adjacent channels without interfering with other local stations, and usually without co-channel interference with distant stations on those channels.[7] Outside the U.S., the heavier spectral loading of the FM broadcast band makes IBoC systems like HD Radio less practical.
The FCC has not indicated any intent to end analog radio broadcasting as it did with analog television,[2] since it would not result in the recovery of any radio spectrum rights which could be sold. Thus, there is no deadline by which consumers must buy an HD receiver.
Maybe some other place.
EDIT: Some countries in Europe apparently have, and some are scheduled to do so in the future.
https://www.radioworld.com/news-and-business/switching-off-fm-in-norway-and-soon-switzerland
This has Norway having killed FM in 2017, and Switzerland scheduled for 2024.
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.
I don’t own an FM radio small enough to shove up my ass, which a phone with FM would solve. I’m sure phone designers will realize their untapped market soon enough.
I don’t own an FM radio small enough to shove up my ass, which a phone with FM would solve.
There are FM radios smaller and more phallic than there are cell phones. You might not own them, but that’s not a problem specific to the radio; clearly your existing cell phone doesn’t do FM or you wouldn’t be running into this problem in the first place.
