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Campaign Demands Telecoms Unlock the FM Radio Found in Many Smartphones (www.cbc.ca)
An anonymous reader cites an article on CBC: Your smartphone may include an FM radio chip but, chances are, it doesn't work. Now, an online campaign has launched in Canada, putting pressure on telecoms and manufacturers to turn on the radio hidden in many cellphones. Titled, "free radio on my phone," the campaign says that most Android smartphones have a built-in FM receiver which doesn't require data or Wi-Fi to operate. The U.S. arm of the campaign believes iPhones also have a built-in radio chip but that it can't be activated. Apple wouldn't confirm this detail. The radio chip in many Android phones also lies dormant. But the campaign says it can easily be activated -- if telecom providers ask the manufacturers to do it. In Canada, however, most of the telecoms haven't made the move to get the radio turned on. They'd prefer that you stream your audio, depleting your phone's costly data plan, claims campaign organizer, Barry Rooke.
Hello,
Public radio tends to be quite good. NPR in the states, France Info, Inter, culture (etc...) in france... and I assume similar chanels in other countries.
Cyrille
While the whip antenna on a car is short, it has a substantial ground plane to work against (the body of the car.) This increases the signal level developed between ground and the antenna input. Sometimes the actual antenna is not as short as you might initially think, either; look closely, and on many car antenna systems, you'll see a fine wire that spirals up the outside of the whip; that's the AM broadcast band antenna, not the whip itself. The whip is just used as a mechanical support when receiving AM. This approach provides significantly stronger signals to the radio.
In order to obtain signals of a similar strength in a portable radio, the usual approach is to wind a lot of wire around a ferrite core and make it resonate with the appropriate matching capacitance. With proper design, this can result in a highly effective narrow-band (just a few channels), tunable, directional antenna capability.
Antennas aside, most car radios don't have very good AM sections. Just as with home stereo and theater receivers, manufacturers tend to not treat AM seriously. Historically speaking, there have been exceptions. For instance, Sansui produced an AM / FM tuner that had a pretty good AM section in it; early tube receivers also typically tried to do a good job. A good AM band receiver has control over IF bandwidth, and in a truly modern design, this is done with a software defined radio, so that the bandwidth is precisely controllable and essentially devoid of roll-off.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
> because they weren't liberal enough.
They fired Juan Williams because he said he was scared of Muslims on airplanes. The only place a blanket statement like that won't get you fired is Fox News, because that's their business model.
In the meantime, All Things Considered has weekly segments with David Brooks (a conservative editorialist) and frequently engages conservative lawmakers in their stories. They had Darrell Issa on back when the USDOJ was trying to force Apple to break into the San Bernardino shooter's phone; last week they had a GOP congressman on to discuss why he was endorsing Donald Trump.
You can say a lot of things about NPR, but one thing you cannot say is that they actively try to prevent or otherwise diminish the presentation of non-liberal viewpoints. And frankly the only people who do actually believe that are better off going elsewhere anyway because it's obvious they don't distinguish between news and partisan cheerleading.