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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 (;-))
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I don't know how much good it will do to listen to a 'local' radio station since most of the time its just a recording anyway.
What you need to listen to is the NOAA weather radio - around here its 162.500 megahertz, and the voice was recorded by Stephen Hawking
While I don't think the lack is a safety risk - and I do think the headline is just the usual sort of attention-whoring we expect from the media these days - having an FM radio is very useful if there is a regional emergency. And since most people are usually carrying a phone anyway, locking out that ability does them a disservice.
Personal anecdote time: back in the big blackout of 2003 that shutdown the Northeastern US, nobody's phones were working because the networks were jammed by millions of people suddenly calling each other, everyone trying to figure out what was going on. Nobody knew anything except that the lights were off and there was an increasingly nervous tension; as this was only a couple years after 9/11, the word "terrorists" was on everybody's lips. I happened to have an MP3 player with FM functionality on me, and that made me very popular, because I could relay news to everyone around me. The temper changed from twitchy nervousness to reassured cooperation, from a fearful me-first attitude to one where informed people worked together to get through the disaster.
I don't think having that radio made me any safer, but it made me - and those around me - happier because we were not cut off from the rest of the world. I still carry that little MP3 player with me, solely for its radio functions even though my phone is one of the rare devices that does have FM functionality (the phone needs a charge every day, but the mp3 player, which is only the size of a thumb-drive, runs seemingly forever on an easily-replaced AA battery).
Its coverage. One single FM transmitter can cover area within a hundred miles, while cell towers can handle only a few miles. To have the same coverage as an FM tower, you need a lot more cell towers. What is easier to keep running ? One FM tower or hundreds if not thousands of cell towers ? Furthermore, FM transmitters are a lot simpler than cell transmitters.
1) Most FM listeners are in cars
2) hardly cars have DAB radios
3) DAB radios hardly ever work in cars
4) If they switched off FM, the car drivers would NOT by DAB replacements.
The current plan is to leave FM radio switch of "till after the next election".
I have listened to FM on my phone twice in two years. I listen in the car all the time. If FM is turned off, I would probably listen to the pirate stations on FM. I surely won't by a DAB radio. My mum has three DAB radios. It is mostly a matter of life style.
As other posters have said "Follow the money".
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its only useful until your cellphone battery dies. Then go find a car with an FM radio, it will likely work for a long time.
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.
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It's not just about phones not working, but about capacity. If there's a big enough emergency (eg the London tube/bus bombings) the number of people using their devices will max out the network, even if every single transceiver is still up and running. Many people's first reaction in such situations is to stand for half an hour on redial trying to get a phone call out. FM would mean being able to "broadcast" information to a lot of people at once, and discourage them from clogging up the network.
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Because these FM transmitters:
1. Have a much greater range. In most cases you will be able to hear a station transmitting from tens of kilometers away, in some cases, hundreds. Cell tower range is limited to single digit kilometers in most cases due to optimization for speed over range. Towers over less populated areas will be optimized for range, but even those barely cover ten to twenty kilometers in best case scenarios. Also, see 4.
2. Are typically designed to have backup power in case of an emergency, and are generally often hardened against many disasters because they are supposed to be used to transmit emergency messages.
3. On a final note, most FM receivers also have AM receiver function. That has range of hundreds of kilometers, thousands during the night due to skywave effect. This is the best technology for emergency broadcasts, as one station can cover up to thousands of kilometers radius around itself.
4. Are one way transmitters. That means they don't rely on phone's weak transmitter's ability to reach the tower.
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've gone through enough hurricanes to watch even land-lined phones becoming a luxury.
Well, it seem to me, that living in a hurricane zone increases your chances of dying in a disaster.
So, if you are worried about lack of FM support on phones . . . just move somewhere else.
Jokes aside, most of us live in areas that are not prone to hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, or Godzilla. If you do choose to live in such places, it is important to be prepared, and have an emergency kit. In which you can just pack in a good ole' FM battery.
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I'm sorry, is it just me? What kind of information are you going to put out over FM to cell-phones, in an emergency, that will be life-saving?
It's not just you, but I'm guessing you've never been in a tornado/hurricane shelter without power huddled around a battery powered radio listening to storm updates. Sometimes the all-clear takes more than a couple hours than what the original predictions were. New funnel clouds crop up from nowhere, or reminders that a hurricane's eye can be very large and the storm isn't over. Flash floods, mud slides, forest fires, etc. If cell phones all has their FM chips enabled, you'd have almost one battery powered radio for every person in the shelter. Some could be turned off or their batteries could be swapped.
>FM would mean being able to "broadcast" information to a lot of people at once, and discourage them from clogging up the network.
GSM had this feature many years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_Broadcast
"Cell Broadcast is not as affected by traffic load; therefore, it may be usable during a disaster when load spikes (mass call events) tend to crash networks, as the 7 July 2005 London bombings showed. Another example was during the Tsunami catastrophe in Asia. Dialog GSM, an operator in Sri Lanka was able to provide ongoing emergency information to its subscribers, to warn of incoming waves, to give news updates, to direct people to supply and distribution centres, and even to arrange donation collections using Celltick's Cell Broadcast Center, based on Cell Broadcast Technology."
But even though it is many many years old, it is still in an infant stage in actual implementation on handsets and MNOs, e.g. local MNOs implemented CB over 3g networks in 2013, still nog 4g support for it.
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].
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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.
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,........
Since I have some phones that have the FM radio enabled all that is needed is headphones.
The antenna is the wires of the headphones.
That is not to say that the pin for the antenna is connected to the headphone connector.
It is also not clear what the regulations domestic and international are for testing the
FM radio for unwanted interference and matching the national band allocations.
But the original question is interesting. Local radio is invaluable in a disaster. The power budget
and infrastructure (transmitter towers) for FM radio are much more available. The service area of
a single FM radio tower could cover hundreds if not thousands of cell towers. Cell towers also depend
on digital backbone and data connections (routers) that also need uninterruptible power.
Local emergency management need only contact the radio station and the radio station only needs
a single generator. Radio is part of the emergency broadcasting system and disconnecting the FM radio
is disconnecting the EBS.
Having said this I recall waiting on the local FM radio station to announce school closure on one
especially nasty blizzards winter morning. There was no announcement... the school system could
not connect to the station by phone and the roads were so deep in snow that direct contact was
impossible.
Legislatures in earthquake, tornado, blizzard, hurricane disaster risk areas (the entire US) should
be paying attention to this. Because of the EBS link your representatives should be demanding internal
communications that fail to enable this important service. Disconnection and de facto dismantling
of the EBS in favor of pay for service revenue should be blocked.
Then there is: "As Radio.no notes, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) will provide Norwegian listeners more diverse radio channel content than ever before. Indeed, DAB already hosts 22 national channels in Norway, as opposed to FM radio’s five, and a TNS Gallup survey shows that 56% of Norwegian listeners use digital radio every day. While Norway is the first country in the world to set a date for an FM switch-off, other countries in Europe and Southeast Asia are also in the process of transitioning to DAB." (gizmodo-dot-com)
Thus I also want DAB support in future phones...
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
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].
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