- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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I’ve been saying this for a while now. FM radios and such are invaluable in emergency situations.
There have been times in the past where I’ve lost power to my house. No internet, no electricity etc in the middle of an emergency weather situation. I had to rely on battery powered radios to learn about what the situation was elsewhere and how long we’d be stuck etc. There is basically no reason why this can’t be incorporated into phones, aside from the fact that phone makers would rather you use Apple Music etc. It should be legislated for I believe.
I wanted to tag on to your post. I’ve been without power for weather stuff too a few times and one thing i learned was that my cheapie 40" TV would only pull 10-15watts with backlight all the way down. With a small battery bank you can go a good while on that and tune into your local station via OTA. It was very watchable especially given the only light around was my candle.
For a couple more watts you watch shows off your memory stick as well once the event is over and you are just waiting for the power lines to get fixed… my phone drained nearly as much but to be fair i left the radio enabled so it was hunting for a tower.
Just something to consider for your gear if you live near the coast or in Texas. Battery banks are pretty cheap.
The components to make the phone able to decode FM radio take place. Which, in such small device, is valuable. If you really need FM radio for emergency situations, why not take a dedicated miniaturized FM radio receiver?
FM radio was integrated in even smaller phones 20 years ago. And the tech to “decode the signal” is already present in today’s phones. FM are radio signals, just like NFC, Wifi, Bluetooth and cellular.
Not the same radio frequencies, not the sames technologies (analog vs digital). Those radio hardware are very specialized, and won’t work on frequencies or technologie they are not meant to.
Correct, not the same technologies. It’s a much simpler circuitry. Very specialized doesn’t mean very complex. A hammer is very specialized too.
I read somewhere that SoC boards on today’s phones still have FM tuning capabilities, but they just don’t use them.
I’ll try to verify that, though.
Edit: this link seems promising: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-unlock-fm-radio-hidden-smartphone/
Not sure if this is still the case, but in the past the FM radio functionality essentially came “free” as part of either the SoC or modem. Since it used headphone wires as the antenna, the death of the headphone jack pretty much killed any purpose for including it.
There is no such thing as “free” functionality in hardware. Old SoC may have had this functionality, but it was at the cost of some die space, that has since been reclaimed by other function more useful to most users.
Old SoC may have had this functionality
Modern SoCs still have it…
Further we’ve moved to Software Defined Radios in general… So it’s all programmable.
No, but it’s so immaterial it hasn’t really been worth the effort to exclude it yet
Hence the quotations around “free”. Qualcomm isn’tgoing to tape out a custom chip without it for you just because you don’t want that block.
that has since been reclaimed by other function more useful to most users.
This was my uncertainty, do you know for certain that they don’t include FM functionality on their chips anymore or are you just guessing? The public facing documentation is not exactly detailed enough to tell for sure.
The functionality is, in fact, still there, and basically every phone with a headphone jack turns it on.
Just buy a $15 FM radio. Especially since you can’t charge your phone when you have no power, but a small radio takes AA batteries which can sit in a drawer for 10 years until you need them.
Yes… but… this becomes one of those things that everyone should buy to be prepared but few actually do or they forget.
I keep a little crank-chargeable radio in our emergency kit but most people don’t. If the cell networks go down (and they usually do in severe weather and most other big emergency situations) most people will lose all of their access to information.
You can make your battery phone last a lot when you are not using the display and disconnect from any networks. You can also have some powerbank around. Emergencies won’t necessarily find you in home or wherever your radio is stored in. You keep your phone with you most of the time, chances are, if an earthquake happens, for example, you’ll have your phone with you. Been there.
In addition to being able to take AAs, my FM radio has a solar panel and a hand crank to recharge the included rechargeable battery, which can charge a phone in a pinch. Win all around!
It probably also picks up the NOAA frequencies for weather forecasts and will have a standby feature for severe weather alerts. Emergency weather radios are pretty cool, and good to have on hand.
It absolutely does!
You’d think so but every device around my house that I “put batteries in it and forget it” when I need it I find the batteries have exploded and the device is ruined (regardless of the decade on the expiry-date label of the battery). So my plan now is to keep the device separate from the batteries like it’s a freaking handgun and make sure my phone is charged so I can use its light to make my way to the drawer where we keep the batteries.
Alkaline batteries are the crappy ones that leak. Get the more expensive lithium batteries, or go full on rechargeable ones, and you can leave them in without worrying about your device getting ruined.
Lkline leaks, lithium explodes
Yeah but at least you’ll know exactly when the lithium ones go bad…
Rechargeable batteries self-discharge and get damaged if left unplugged for too long, and explode if left plugged in. They are not ideal for something you want to pack away in an emergency kit.
Almost everything in an emergency kit expires. But many name brand alkaline and non rechargeable lithiums are now rated for ten years shelf life. In addition there are rechargeable eneloop branded batteries rated for slower discharge rate.
Yes, but there’s a difference between “expires” and “leaks all over the inside of my emergency radio”. And they don’t make it to half their stated lifespans once put into a flashlight and the flashlight goes into storage.
I’m glad battery backup can keep the internet going for a long time but I also have data to use and never get close to making a dent in it. If service providers went down though I do have several radios around the house. I don’t go anywhere but I’d I did i would carry a little radio lol. That being said, I miss my smart phone and flip phone that had radio on it. I don’t care about headphone jacks but I definitely would love radio.
I wholeheartedly agree, but I don’t think there’s any saving it at this point. Car manufacturers are dropping it from new models and that’s the only actual AM/FM radio most people actually buy these days.
Same thing happened to the phone network. It used to actually be possible to call 911 when the power was out. The central stations all had battery banks and diesel generators. Unless the lines were cut, you had service.
One reason is that every implementation I’ve ever tried relies on using the wired earphones as an aerial and Apple magically convinced everyone that having a 3.5mm port is somehow a bad thing.
Exactly. The real plea here is “bring back 3.5mm ports.” I’m afraid of the day my old phone dies because I have this fear that even cheap-ass phones are going to abandon 3.5mm headphones for cheap, unreliable, garbage bluetooth trash.
Just double-checked. My current smartphone that I partially picked for it’s 3.5mm socket does have built in FM radio that works great and only functions with earphones plugged in.
So glad that mine does.
Imagine if every American had a shortwave radio transmitter in their pocket. Endless September for hams
As a ham, ugh.
I dream of it being more common to have radios in everyone’s pocket, but it needs to be accompanied by some level of education on how to use it.
I’d imagine no phone would have transmission ability, or at most transmit like a Walkie talkie
There are some ham radio call phones that can transmit. They’re pretty specialized and not cheap, but they exist… around $1200 for what is essentially 3+ year old phone hardware (with software to match … Android 9-ish) with a built in transceiver… I like the idea, but I’m not paying that much for a very old phone because it happens to have a ham radio built in.
The current ideas with adding radios to phones is almost entirely to pick up broadcast radio, like am/FM. Nothing fancy.
Maybe the price of the transceivers would go down, at least, lol. I have a general license and I just mess around with a Baofeng for the most part because I cannot justify buying a better radio. Tempted to get a QCX-mini or Pixie kit for a project… Unfortunately the like… $1000+ transceivers are just way out of budget for me, and I’m not sure I’d get enough use out of it to warrant the expense.
Mine still does. puts on shades
Why? ClearChannel has all but ruined it.
Certain phones have it, but use your wired headphones as an antenna while leveraging your Bluetooth… In Japan they had phones with TV tuners
FM was switched off in 2017 (Norway), but a DAB chip would’ve been nice.
With all the blackouts I had these past 2 years, YEA PLEASE. Hell, I was a out to relearn how to make a homemade AM radio. Haven’t done it in 28 years.
Wait, you guys don’t have FM radio on your phones?
Wdym again?
The last couple major power failures we’ve had in my area, information was by far the most difficult thing to come by.
The power goes out, and shortly thereafter so does cable internet. My UPS usually keeps my cable box up longer than the service itself lasts. That puts everyone on the cell network, which is immediately overloaded. So the internet is essentially worthless during most hours.
FM radio stations are similarly worthless. I remember a power outage last winter where there was going to be a press conference, I think the governor was going to talk about something…couldn’t get coverage. The local FM station was up and running, they were broadcasting just fine, but they were trying to patch into the press conference via Facebook, and the internet wasn’t up to it. They apparently don’t have their own radio uplinks anymore.
The local television station would have been more help…if I could get an antenna high enough to hear it.
And during normal business hours most broadcast FM stations are IHeartRadio transmitting the same 20 songs intercut with the same 90,000 advertisements. Or broadcasting The Two Retards Named Chris show three times a day.
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Even most cheapo mp3 players have this functionality built in
I miss when MP3 players were popular. There was a lot more variety in consumer tech before 2013-ish
I love my Surfans F20 got it 3 years ago and its still going strong after quite a few drops and nicks. I wish they made a updated usb-c version but otherwise as a big music guy that hates music streaming, downloads everything, and prefers the convinence of a dedicated digital audio device its just awesome.
That thing looks super nice!
Looks vaguely like the older Zunes
That thing looks old as hell in the best possible ways haha, I love it
It’d be better if it had fm transmiter, so you van turn car radio or normal old radio into a useful wireless speaker
In 2017, Mexico passed regulation that required all smartphones with FM chips to enable them
Now I’ve got in my head “I’m on a Mexican, radio…”
