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
They are still there in some chinese brand phones. I'm not sure it's mentioned anywhere on the box tho.
SD Card is pretty much a necessity for me. I really wish the 1TB cards were more affordable. And when I had a phone with removable battery, I used that too. Instead of a power bank, I had 2 batteries. Instant recharge basically.
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!
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.
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.
Fair point.
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.
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
Good luck bringing it back when the whole industry moves away from wired headphones and 3.5mm jacks.
industry moves away
And nobody asked them to.
THATS WHY? i was always confused why that was the case. i thought it was a ""feature"" to only enable fm for headphones. my old phone also only allowed the eq to be used with a speaker other than the internal one
Probably had 2 audio chips and 1 for the speaker and one for the 3.5mm jack, with only one having EQ capabilities
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.
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:
More power-friendly than a cell phone.
At least a portion of the kinds of things that might take out the cell infrastructure (e.g. cyberwarfare targeting the cell system) may also take out phones themselves, like if someone can push bad updates out to the phones. Your dead-simple FM radio isn't going to have problems unless actual FM radio broadcasters get knocked out. If you're in the US, there is very little real opportunity for someone to conduct a significant, conventional attack on the country, but being able to find holes in the Internet-connected infrastructure and do damage there has a lot more unknowns and the ability of various parties to disable or destroy it is much more of a possibility. Militaries do build up collections of holes to hit adversaries with. One of the first things Russia did when invading Ukraine was to knock out Viasat infrastructure, using a hole that they'd discovered in that company's network, to degrade communications in Ukraine by pushing out an update to brick satellite modems. 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.
Some phone today do have that. Service providers like to disable the feature though
They would have to put the headphone jacks back in since the wires were the antenna
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).
... 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.
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