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Does Lack of FM Support On Phones Increase Your Chances of Dying In a Disaster?
theodp writes "You may not know it," reports NPR's Emma Bowman, "but most of today's smartphones have FM radios inside of them. But the FM chip is not activated on two-thirds of devices. That's because mobile makers have the FM capability switched off. The National Association of Broadcasters has been asking mobile makers to change this. But the mobile industry, which profits from selling data to smartphone users, says that with the consumer's move toward mobile streaming apps, the demand for radio simply isn't there." But FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate says radio-enabled smartphones could sure come in handy during times of emergency. So, is it irresponsible not to activate the FM chips? And should it's-the-app-way-or-the-highway Apple follow Microsoft's lead and make no-static-at-all FM available on iPhones?
I think the article is either miswritten or FEMA/NAB misdirecting their blame. I highly doubt the manufacturers of the phones (LG, Samsung, etc) are the ones pushing for the disabling of the FM chip but requirements from the mobile service providers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc) who as the article noted are far more inclined to rake in profits if customers use data services instead of over the air reception and have a long history of locking down phone features for their own enrichment. FYI I tried to load the app National Association of Broadcasters is noting in this article (NextRadio) and I couldn't, apparently even though FM is enabled on my phone their app is only supported on a a select set of phones.
Many stations have emergency generators, as people use radio to get information during natural disasters (;-))
davecb@spamcop.net
Why do you assume they wouldn't be? Broadcast facilities usually are engineered with disasters in mind; it doesn't mean they are invincible, but there are almost always backup batteries, backup generators, and alternate transmission sites available. Your typical 3G tower is not as well engineered and can't be as reliably counted on for disaster communication.
Cell towers also have emergency generators.
Good, then there will be more redundancy.
I've gone through enough hurricanes to watch even land-lined phones becoming a luxury. Cell towers are useless, and their backups wouldn't even last a week. FM is old stable tech and easier to use to give out information.
Even from the consumer perspective, using FM would likely reduce the power consumption compared to streaming from a web service.
AM is even better, because of the range. So, keep an AM/FM radio with your emergency supplies. If your emergency supply is only a cell phone, you're screwed anyway.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Why do you assume FM transmissions would still be working?
Because they continued to transmit during disasters in the past. The best predictor of future performance is past performance.
I am a ham radio operator, I have a significantly higher chance of survival than the rest.
If people really cared about safety they would take the time to learn CPR, basic First Aid, and things like ham radio or gain knowlege in how to increase their odds.
Dancing with the stars and Americas got Talent are far more important to the general population.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Because the article is very misleading.
Smartphones MAY have a chip in them that is capable of receiving FM transmissions [probably as part of the Qualcomm/whomever chip for processing cell phone signals].
But not a matter of 'just turn it on' and everything magically works.
You need an antennae/other external hardware that receives those signals properly. I'm not an antennae engineer, but you either need a separate antennae [which would totally be a non-starter] or you have to compromise the design of existing antennae, because now it has to work for more frequencies.
You also need the software side to work. Since the signal is [most likely] coming from the cellular chip, it also affects the separate baseband software, as well as the main OS.
Then they need to see how it affects battery life with an additional radio turned on, as well as how it affects cellular, wifi and bluetooth reception/transmission.
And don't forget that NONE of the wireless carriers in the US would want the phone to have this feature, because it means the user can be listening to music that they are streaming to their phone FOR FREE, and the carrier would be making no money from it at all. They would rather the user just have the choice of 'do without or preload the music on the phone or pay for streaming music on the phone by paying the carrier extra money] (and they would really prefer to prevent that middle option, but that would have been a really tough sell earlier and impossible now].
Finally, these whiners wouldn't stop at just 'enable the FM reception' capability. It would be 'automatically detect an emergency broadcast and switch to FM automatically when one is broadcast'. Which means another radio always be on. And if that happened...how many days before an FM station sent a fake signal that would trigger this feature without really sounding like an emergency broadcast signal, so the phone would automatically switch to their station for a few minutes. And they could just say it was a bug in the cell phone, that they didn't broadcast a full, real emergency signal.
Anyway, Apple never did this, because they want people to get their music from the iTunes music store, and everyone else doesn't because the carriers won't let them [at least here in the US].
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Even phones that have the FM feature enabled don't have an internal antenna, because it would be too small to be useful. FM band is very roughly 100MHz (actually below that). Do the math of what a quarter wave antenna looks like at that frequency. That's why phones that support FM require you to have earphones attached;-they use the cable as the FM antenna. Ironic that this story surfaces at the same time as Norway announces an analog FM sunset date. Probably in ten years there won't be any FM stations in first world countries at all.
So, for a bunch of people, the FM feature would never work, because they don't use wired headphones.
"Please plug in a wired headset to enabled this feature".
A non-trivial number of people:
-just use it as a hand-held device, holding it up to their head when using it as a phone
-have a wireless headset
And it can't be great for those that do, because you don't know how long the antennae is, or how it's terminated [or even more fun, splitters so the port drives two sets of headphones].
These problems aren't insurmountable, but it all takes a bunch of time and effort [so it would add to the cost of every phone], along with competing goals of two separate wireless industries [FM Radio vs cellular providers]. And given that the cellular providers are a much bigger industry than FM Radio in the US, it seems unlikely that FM Radio will be able to give a large enough 'contribution' to Congress and/or the FCC to make this happen [and there definitely doesn't seem to be enough actual end users clamoring for this to get them to do it].
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The antenna matching is obviously crude, but what it amounts to is a butterfly net to catch the signal instead of just holding out your hand and saying "here, butterfly". My comment about antennas was more related to the earlier poster's talk about how you'd have to degrade the cell antenna to enable FM reception. You wouldn't use a single antenna for this anyway, cellphones have multiple antennas properly matched for Bluetooth, GPS/GLONASS, WiFi and cellular (often more than one cellular antenna too). So IF you were going to enable FM reception, you'd add an antenna, BUT that antenna would be almost useless which is why approximately nobody does it. (If you override the app warning with some tweakery, you can sometimes pick up extremely strong stations just with leakage into the frontend, no actual antenna. But it's basically useless).