this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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I didn't even realize Qualcomm removed the built in FM radio from their chips. Huh.

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[–] Zellith@kbin.social 60 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Maybe the 3.5mm jack and headphones could double as an antenna!

[–] aalvare2@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 44 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Analogue radio is getting shut down in favor of digital broadcasts, so I doubt this would truly be helpful in many areas.

[–] WarmSoda@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)
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[–] Caketaco@lemmy.dbzer0.com 33 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] roanescence@lemmy.today 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We're taking a FM radio there ; )

[–] Caketaco@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] ohitsbreadley@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That's...that's not where radios go...or phones for that matter...

[–] drgnfckr@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Then why do phones vibrate

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[–] Caketaco@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago

We all have our own lifehacks.

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[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 32 points 1 year ago

Germany barely has FM anymore - it's due to be shut off in the next few years.

[–] pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

my phone has an fm radio but it needs wired headphones

[–] smallaubergine@kbin.social 34 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That's because the FM signal needs an antenna that's longer than you can fit in your phone

[–] SternburgExport@feddit.de 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Good luck bringing it back when the whole industry moves away from wired headphones and 3.5mm jacks.

[–] PoisonedPrisonPanda@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

industry moves away

And nobody asked them to.

[–] SternburgExport@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago
[–] tal@lemmy.today 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I like 1/8" jacks too, but active noise cancellation -- which is pretty impressive, honestly -- legitimately needed a source of power, and there was no standard way of providing that over that interface.

You can get both USB-C or Bluetooth adapters for a 1/8" headphone set to run an existing pair. I'll concede that it's a bit more bulk to carry, but one can continue to use 1/8" headphones with phones.

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[–] darcy@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] TwanHE@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Probably had 2 audio chips and 1 for the speaker and one for the 3.5mm jack, with only one having EQ capabilities

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[–] binboupan@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Nokia 105 (2023) has a radio that works without headphones so this is not necessarily true.

[–] Senuf@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

I had an old Moto phone with an FM radio that worked without headphones, although it was stated that with headphones plugged in reception would be much better (which was true). My current phone (a Moto one too) has FM radio, and I use it.

I never had a phone without FM radio. It's one of the features I actually want in my phone.

[–] limerod@reddthat.com 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The redmi 7a smartphone I had also supported wireless FM radio without plugging in a headphone jack.

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[–] OldQWERTYbastard@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

Ah, the elusive "C o u r a g e" port.

[–] jcs@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] MaxVoltage@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

you can listen to encrypted radio transmissions this way with the correct codes and software of course

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] JokeDeity@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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?

[–] tal@lemmy.today 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It charges a battery in the radio, and then that discharges while charging other devices. Now, you may be spending an unpleasantly-long amount of time cranking the thing, but that's another matter.

[–] JokeDeity@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago (8 children)

With respect, I'd like to double down on my question and ask if you personally have used it to charge your phone and how well it worked.

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[–] bolanrox@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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).

[–] v81@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not that straight forward. And in a practical sense 162MHz is hardly significantly higher than 100MHz.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] mtdyson_01@lemmynsfw.com 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

They would have to put the headphone jacks back in since the wires were the antenna

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[–] Sargteapot@lemmy.nz 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

... 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???!

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago

Germany got it removed for more than 6 years ago. My last capable phone was the Samsung S3.

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