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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?
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.
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
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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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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