22 ms·
Samsung is the latest OEM to unlock FM chips in new phones
- dqv 9y agoYay! I will finally be able to listen to NPR on my phone without using data.
- balladeer 9y agoThis would be my use case too. But data is extremely cheap here in India (as of now at least; after Jio happened). My main concern was huge battery drain while using data.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoSide note: If you ask your local station to contact T-Mobile to be included in their zero rating program for content steaming (and you’re on T-Mobile), you’ll get the same effect and be able to listen to your local NPR affiliate from anywhere in the US. Disclaimer: My hometown NPR affiliate was happy to apply, and now I listen to NPR on my occasional commute ~1000 miles away from my hometown station.
- tudorw 9y agoAny data broadcast potential there ? Localised FM data broadcasts might be fun to mess around with.
- LeonM 9y agoYou can, but it will be really, really slow. And one-way only of course. HAM operators have been using that since the 80's (maybe earlier?), broadcasting data, pictures (i.e. SSTV) or text (i.e. hellscreiber)
- aidenn0 9y agoFM radio is both wideband and very high power, so I imagine it should be able to get at least 100kbps if you replaced the audio with trellis-modulated data, though I'm sure the FCC wouldn't be very fond of that
- lawlessone 9y agoThere is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System In some cars i can see display of the song name. It's also possible to turn a raspberry pi into an FM transmitter. http://www.icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry_Pi_Into_an_FM_Transmitter http://www.icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspb...
- julianj 9y agoI am curious if the FM chip is able to listen outside of the typical 88-108 MHz.
- Jeema101 9y agoJapan uses 76-90 MHz for FM broadcasting, so my guess would be that most might be able to go down to 76 at least.
- mikestew 9y agoMost certainly, it is what drove data to Microsoft SPOT watches: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Personal_Objects_Technology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Personal_Objects_Techn... I still have a few lying around, though the data service has long since been turned off. It was low-bandwidth, but suitable for stock prices, weather, and incoming-only text messages via (IIRC) MSN Messenger. Cell phones have since replaced the functionality, but I loved mine at the time.
- lflux 9y agoYes, DARC is used to broadcast public transit arrival times over one of the public FM radio stations in Stockholm and Helsinki (and probably other places): http://www.windytan.com/2013/11/broadcast-messages-on-darc-side.html http://www.windytan.com/2013/11/broadcast-messages-on-darc-s...
- reaperducer 9y agoThere have been several schemes over the years for using FM broadcasts for data. In the early 80's, you could hook your home computer (Commodore 64, etc...) to the headphone jack of a radio and late at night some stations would carry a program that would send data. It sounded a lot like an old-school modem. In the mid-90's I had a TV set-top box that gathered TV guide information over an FM data subcarrier. The company went out of business. These days, data over broadcast is done on TV channels instead of FM because the bandwidth is larger. There's one of these operating on channel 20ish in Houston. I have no idea what data it's broadcasting.
- shams93 9y agoThis is also great for safety often you only get disaster information from radio and TV. In the event of a major earthquake or other disaster this could be a life saver.
- ttsda 9y agoThat's what's written in the article.
- samfisher83 9y agoIts been on the US s8 ever since I got the phone. You just need nextRadio app to use it.
- LeonM 9y agoCan't really tell if you are joking, or just don't know that phones have actual FM receiver build in.
- julianj 9y agoNextRadio is an app that interfaces with the the FM receiver on android phones that have the chip enabled. It can operate in 'tuner only mode'. Edit: http://nextradioapp.com/supported-devices/ http://nextradioapp.com/supported-devices/
- 5555624 9y agoNextRadio requires support from your carrier. A phone with an enabled chip is not enough. I have a Sony Z3 and a Sony Z3C and the FM radio has always worked. NextRadio has never supported them. (I got them right after T-Mobile stopped their brief support of the Z3.) The same thing happened with my AT&T NEC Terrain -- the FM radio chip was always enabled; but, NextRadio would not work (and was not supported).
- matt_heimer 9y agoYou still need an app to turn on and tune the FM receiver, that is what the http://nextradioapp.com/ http://nextradioapp.com/ app is. Apparently it does have a fallback to stream but its focus is on the FM chip. They even have a search page on their site to help you figure out which phones have an FM chip.
- samfisher83 9y agoI know they have FM receiver chips built in. They are built into the QCOM chips. If you use the NextRadio app you can use the FM chip on the Radio to tune into FM stations. I am not sure why I am getting downvoted for providing some information.
- gumby 9y agoFeels like the people who still listen to radio are the people who don’t have smartphones: age-based. I only have one friend whom I know listens to the radio, and that in his car. I guess I just assume that radio is just for the elderly.
- Shivetya 9y agowhen driving in radio is great for traffic information and up to date weather as some weather apps seem to drag when it comes to being current other than active RADAR maps. considering the number of billboards and other advertisements there is a big following in the general populace. many rating services would dispute that it is consumed only by the elderly.
- lostlogin 9y agoSpeaking of adverts, the thing that killed my use of the radio is adverts. It’s brutal to listen to so many. It baffles me that anyone tolerates it. That and DJs who seem to believe people want to hear them rather rather than the content.
- mikestew 9y agoIt is why I listen only to one of the NPR affiliates or other listener-supported radio (e. g., KEXP in Seattle). Not that I’m a public radio nut (though, kinda), I’d just rather listen to nothing than put up with the cackling hyenas on commercial drive-time radio. My wife leaves the car radio on the local classic rock station, and it rarely is playing a song when I start the car. An iPhone with access to every song iTunes has, and she listens to that crap. I don’t get it.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoThat's what preset buttons are for.
- brewdad 9y agoUntil 5 of the stations are all playing commercials and it's pledge drive week on NPR.
- untog 9y agoEvery now and then I wonder if we're making a mistake with the new tech we're bringing in to replace radio and TV broadcasts. FM/UHF broadcasts scale infinitely! There's something quite beautiful about them, technologically. It's not difficult to imagine that in any kind of emergency scenario internet-based broadcast systems will collapse. And maybe it's just me, but I always found broadcast to be pretty reliable (or at least consistently unreliable in ways I could predict) - online broadcasts have a tendency to fail/buffer/etc. at totally random intervals.
- chrisseaton 9y ago> FM/UHF broadcasts scale infinitely! They do for the number of listeners. They don't scale at all for the number of broadcasters.
- niftich 9y agoThe spectrum is regulated by governments everywhere, so it doesn't have to. Or, if you prefer, "that ship has sailed" a long time ago, so let's look at what it gives us as it exists now. Technologically effortless dissemination of content from a central source, scaling to infinite receivers with no congestion and no loss of quality. The production of the content itself need not be vertically integrated; individual programs and segments are licensed and syndicated from third-parties. Airwave broadcast has a natural place in the world, ideally by playing popular content that's always in demand. In our rush to go point-to-point, full-duplex, and on-demand, with both cabling and wireless, we have occasionally reimplemented services that are one-to-many simplex on top of lower layers that aren't made for that, whereas airwave broadcast has always fulfilled the same usecase with a different set of tradeoffs.
- nine_k 9y agoBroadcasting is too efficient. There's no way to require individual authorization from receivers, so subscription fees are hard to collect. For free content, ads are not very targeted. It's great for emergency communication, though.
- gadders 9y agoSadly this is only for SnapDragon based Samsung S8s. No good for my Exynos-based version in the UK.
- rkachowski 9y agoI'm not following too well.. what is the exact motivation for including FM chips that are going to be disabled in the first place? What series of events lead to FM capable hardware being incidentally included, but disabled in modern smartphones?
- mikepavone 9y agoPretty sure there's not a separate chip so much as it's built into one of the chips that's already used. Presumably it's built into those chips for markets in which FM radio support is considered important and it doesn't take up enough die space to be worth making an FM-less version.
- ungzd 9y agoProbably there are no separate "chips", but functionality built in into the same integrated circuit as CPU and other things (SoC). The reason to include it into SoC is that the same SoC is used in various devices, not only phones, and it's not so complicated thing, just heterodyne and ADC. Mainstream media loves the word "chip" and uses it in any context they like.
- cesarb 9y ago> what is the exact motivation for including FM chips that are going to be disabled in the first place? A single chip can do multiple things (WiFi, Bluetooth, FM, etc). For the chip manufacturer, it's simpler and cheaper to provide a single version of the chip with everything, and let the device manufacturer simply disable the unused parts, than to provide several different versions of the chip, some with FM and some without FM. That is, the phone manufacturer decides "I want Bluetooth and WiFi", and the chip they chose for that happened to also have FM. Since they won't use the FM part of the chip, they don't even have to connect the "FM antenna input" pin, saving the space on the board that would be used for the corresponding trace(s) and passive components (which they also don't have to install, reducing the costs).
- phkahler 9y agoYou may want to read about software defined radio. It's quite possible that it's not even extra circuitry going unused. As the others say, it's so small the die area savings isn't even worth making a different variant of the chip.
- throw7 9y agoBoth my parents cheap flip and small android phone have working FM tuners. The headphones work as antennas and it's quite nice actually... I'm sitting there with a >$500 "smart" phone and envious.
- pedrocr 9y agoIf it's an Android phone it may be the case that installing a third party OS like LineageOS will give you that ability back.
- cobbzilla 9y agoFor emergency purposes I wonder how hard it is to include an AM receiver. AM waves can travel much farther than FM. I'd guess it's one more part that adds some marginal cost, and there's more music/fun stuff on FM.
- vvanders 9y agoUsually the FM discriminator is built in hardware, esp if you want low power usage so it's probably not something easily done. Although having a Phone + proper I/Q SDR in one package would be pretty darn awesome though.
- samfisher83 9y agoAM has a much longer wavelength. AM is super simple. It is Amplitude modulation. You take a signal and multiply it by a sinewave. The issue is you need a bigger antenna, and probably need to block noise better since AM has lot of issues with noise.
- reaperducer 9y agoAM needs a much larger, heavier antenna. A good AM antenna is heavier than your entire phone.
- gpvos 9y agoIn Europe, AM is being turned off or has already been turned off in many countries.
- phkahler 9y agoCan we get the aircraft band too? It's a little above the FM frequencies.
- ajosh 9y agoAircraft bands use AM rather than FM because of the FM capture effect. When there is a double transmission with FM, the receiver will lock on to one signal and exclude the other. With AM, you will hear both as well as, possibly, a heterodyne tone if the carriers aren't exactly the same frequency which is much preferable. FM demodulators can't really demodulate AM signals. AM demodulation can demodulate FM by tuning a bit off the carrier frequency thanks to the fall-off of the filters but the quality isn't great.
- Aloha 9y ago> FM demodulators can't really demodulate AM signals. AM demodulation can demodulate FM by tuning a bit off the carrier frequency thanks to the fall-off of the filters but the quality isn't great. By "isn't great" you mean, "I might be able to understand something with a tailwind, downhill" - right? :-P The mode of operation for an AM radio listening to FM is akin to a slope detector.
- beamatronic 9y agoWhy can't we just get a software-defined radio in the hardware...
- vvanders 9y agoThat's because SDRs hog a lot more power than discrete components. For something like a phone stand-by/screen-off power usage is a pretty critical component.
- cesarb 9y agoSome phones have optional removable components like extra batteries, higher-quality speakers/cameras, or even projectors. It would be cool if someone made a SDR add-on for these phones.
- tinus_hn 9y agoGreat for people clinging to obsolete technology. DAB+ does the same thing with better audio quality, less spectrum usage and more possibilities.
- stordoff 9y agoIn theory, yes[0], but DAB in the UK at least is tending towards low bitrate, and often mono, streams -- see, e.g., https://www.astra2sat.com/radio/uk-digital-radio-bitrates/ https://www.astra2sat.com/radio/uk-digital-radio-bitrates/ [0] Personally I find FM preferable to HE-AAC, but it's just a different set of trade-offs, not necessarily better.
- tinus_hn 9y agoObviously there is a trade off, either you get a large amount of low quality streams or a few high quality streams. You can do the same thing with FM, if you only allow stations to transmit mono audio you can fit more. I don’t know how many channels you get in the UK on FM vs. on DAB+ but it seems like the list of digital stations in that link is longer than would be possible using FM. This all doesn’t change the fact that DAB+ uses the spectrum much more effectively. Of course, on low bitrates you can learn to hear the artifacts. Just as you can hear the distortions in FM. But you need less spectrum for a stream where you can’t hear the artifacts. There isn’t some big conspiracy selling you digital radio, it’s just better.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoIn the UK there was something of a "conspiracy" (misselling is probably more like it) in that initially DAB was presented as high quality, giving a big reason to buy in, but it was quickly downgraded in quality once momentum had built for the change. My impression is a simple radio set is now about 4 times what it was before DAB, not sure where that fits in ...
- stordoff 9y agoUnless I'm misremembering, similar happened with Freeview. At launch, most channels broadcast at 720x576. Now, most are broadcast at 544x576.
- ramshanker 9y agoAs long as there is Traffic on the Road, FM will have a demand. :D.
- Namrog84 9y agoWill autonomous cars with nothing but Netflix and other video streaming services and no steering wheel also have fm radio? I can easily forsee within my lifetime the banning of traditional human road drivers.
- fasteddy760 9y agoWill require two things, a shift in vehicle insurance costs. And the costs for personal insurance and fuel to be a barrier swaying public interest. There will still be a desire to drive, although falling out of popularity including stigma against "drivers" who less safe than the systems designed to protect passengers, but are willing to pay for the pleasure.
- pjmlp 9y agoAll my J2ME, Symbian, Windows Phone and Android devices have FM radio, using the headphones as antenna. One just needs to make the right options and give money to OEMs that favour us.
- reaperducer 9y agoIt's always been strange to me that iPods had radios, but iPhones didn't.
- mrlyc 9y agoI'm confused. Both my Samsung Galaxy Ace GT-S5830T (January 2011) and Galaxy Ace 3 GT-S7275Y (June 2013) phones came with an app called "FM Radio" that works. They cost me $100 on sale. Why don't the more expensive ones have that feature?
- overlordalex 9y agoProbably because you live outside of America - for some reason carriers in the states block the FM chip on their phones. "Your phone has an fm chip. So why can't you listen to the radio?" https://www.wired.com/2016/07/phones-fm-chips-radio-smartphone/ https://www.wired.com/2016/07/phones-fm-chips-radio-smartpho...
- szatkus 9y agoMakes sense. In Europe all smartphones I had had FM Radio application. It requires headphones, but it works.
- sverige 9y agoThe radio is built into most chips, even on feature phones. They are generally blocked, or have been until recently, mainly because of politics--using an FM receiver means you might use less bandwidth, which means less revenue for carriers. I have a couple of feature phones built for the Russian market that have FM enabled. I think most non-US phones actually have working FM receivers, but I am not certain of that.
- Bromskloss 9y agoHuh, the Samsungs people around me have had have had FM receivers for years. Did they disable them and then enable them again?
- lgats 9y agoGuess it's a good time to buy some IHRT