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Campaign Demands Telecoms Unlock the FM Radio Found in Many Smartphones (www.cbc.ca)

Posted by msmash on from the radio-wants-to-be-free dept.

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.

10 of 340 comments (clear)

  1. FM radio's last gasp? by Registered+Coward+v2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wonder how much of this is actual consumer demand for listening to ads and the same songs every hour to avoid data overages vs. FM radio's last desperate gasp to remain relevant now that streaming is offering an alternative?

    --
    I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
    1. Re:FM radio's last gasp? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I disagree - and there are tested historical facts to show my point.
      At 9/11, the cell towers couldn't handle the load and basically cell
      phones became useless as communication devices. And with no
      data, no "FM" app would work either.

      Now, an analogue FM radio won't allow you to phone home, but
      with an emergency like that, you'd at least be able to get some
      sort of news, maybe helpful information about the event. And it's
      not like the chips in the phone are defective FM receivers, they
      are intentionally disabled by iApple (and other like-manufacturers)
      to force you to use an app to gain that functionality. Sadly, users
      believe that the app is the FM receiver and they're not corrected
      by the salesman.

      I'd like to see this as an FCC mandate (that cell phones are required to
      have a non-app working FM receiver) since it really is a public safety issue.
      That's just common sense, IMHO.

      CAP === 'invented'

    2. Re:FM radio's last gasp? by Lumpy · · Score: 1, Interesting

      HDFM (Hybrid Digital FM, not what they want you to think it is) Is not getting any decent traction anywhere. The radios stations hate spending money so they usually dont upgrade the modulator to get the HDFM signal, and almost NO radios support receiving HDFM..

      Broadcasthas been dying for years, I have not listened to FM for 10 years now, I grabbed Sirius and haven't looked back. And contrary to the poor people that whine about Sat radio and how nobody uses it... Last report was over 28,000,000 subscribers with an average of two receivers (I personally have 4). Comcast has fewer customers.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    3. Re:FM radio's last gasp? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Indeed. There will never be a smart phone with an integral ferrite bar antenna. AM is a real throwback in terms of wavelength; 540–1610 kHz in the US. That's kilohertz; 5 orders of magnitude lower than most FM radio. Nothing really wrong with that except you can't detect it well without a long enough piece of wire, so AM radio and very small portable devices are fundamentally incompatible.

      There is a good public safety argument to be made in support of FM radio reception. FM stations radiate a lot energy and cover much larger areas than cell towers. When the proverbial shit hits the fan they are likely to still be operating and broadcasting valuable information to people out of range of cell or cut off from cell by congestion. There is absolutely no technical reason smartphones with a headphone wire (the antenna) couldn't receive FM radio with extremely high fidelity.

      Likelywise, there isn't any technical reason a smartphone couldn't also receive digital television broadcasts... They could easily contain the digital codecs (if they don't have them already.) $20 USB dongles do this now.

    4. Re:FM radio's last gasp? by fyngyrz · · Score: 4, Interesting

      So far, though, those $20 dongles require quite a lot of additional CPU power to do WFM demodulation, which requires a minimum of 180 Khz bandwidth (in the US, WFM is allocated 200 KHz slots, within which 75% modulation is the legal maximum, which, using Carson's rule, results in about 180 KHz of bandwidth use.) They require even more to to analog television, which are (were) allocated six MHz per channel.

      As the author of SdrDx I have reason to know. :)

      I am sure, however, that the currently large CPU requirements could be gotten around with some additional specialized hardware.

      However, there are obvious financial reasons why a carrier would prefer you use bandwidth to receive information. So I wouldn't hold my breath.

      --
      I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    5. Re:FM radio's last gasp? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      And that, ladies and gents, is why you need a good lawyer: they're great at making things up that sound so much like they should be true that, well, surely they are true?

      IOW, parent sounds like sensible conjecture but is totally made up. Most digital rollouts have NOT been with a huge decrease in transmitter power, and a codec that actually handles the sort of signal distortion that occurs in the real world AND maintains FM quality stereo has not been deployed in most countries.

    6. Re:FM radio's last gasp? by rockmuelle · · Score: 4, Interesting

      One person's trash is another's feast. Most of the music on the radio is actually quite good, if you're a fan of music and not just a fan of one particular genre. Pop music, for all its commercial faults, is popular for a reason. People like it.

      Sure, classical and folk are good, too. So is jazz, rock, EDM, noise (yeah, it's a genre), and just about every other style people have come up with.

      I challenge you to listen to some EDM and compare it to your favorite classical pieces. While we have had 300+ years to study classical music to death, the overall structure of the music is pretty much the same as EDM: invent a theme/hook, make some variations on it, connect the variations together for dramatic effect, embellish it all using the underlying implied chordal structure by overusing arpeggios ;).

      Folk and Pop basically have the same relationship. Both tend to have rigid rules around song structure (ABAB,ABCAB, etc), use simple chord changes (almost always some mix of I, IV, V in both genres), and have lyrics that resonate with the listener base. Interestingly, they're also controlled with an iron fist by the powers in the genres - just try developing a new folk song without approval of the keepers of the Great American Songbook. ;) (I play in a country/folk band, the powers-that-be are almost as annoying as those from the jazz world, where I've also spent a lot of time)

      The meta point being: Across genres, music is more similar the different. I encourage you to go on a listening bender across your local FM stations and seed a few Pandora stations with random things.

  2. Safety by captaindomon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I do some safety consulting for disasters etc. This would be very helpful for disasters. You could even have an app that just tunes into the local emergency FM frequency. It's way easier to broadcast emergency instructions over FM to three million people in a metro area, than to support three million active streams over a data network, especially in an emergency.

    --
    Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
  3. It's not just software by larwe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sure, many integrated WiFi/BT chipsets also include an FM receiver. But turning it on, in a phone that wasn't shipped with it turned on, is not just a software matter. With the LO powered up, you'll need to repeat conducted and radiated emissions tests. And if the phone wasn't intended to be shipped with the radio enabled, the necessary passives to connect it to the earphone jack as an antenna likely won't be on the PCB. And in the case of Apple, since they absolutely never intended to use the FM capability, I'd be amazed if the relevant pads from the WiFi package are even led out to traces.

  4. Misleading campaign statements by Zen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Not all phones have the FM Chips, but the campaign misleads us into thinking all phones have them, and the carriers just disabled them. I use a Nexus phone. There's no chip. My wife's LG does have a chip. According to the campaign website, Sprint already allows it, and T-Mobile has stated they will support.

    If you purchase your phone and it is unlocked, the carrier is irrelevant. You can do what you want with it (provided it has the chip). If you bought a locked phone through a carrier, then you're at the whim of what they want to allow you to do with your device. Why is this news?

    I may be missing something here, but I don't fully understand the emergency beacon type responses. Yes, of course I understand that the more options available for getting emergency information out the better. Of course that makes sense. But I get emergency beacons every once in a while on my phone today through either text or SMS (I've never investigated the mechanism). OK - now I've done 13 seconds of google-fu, and they apparently are not text messages and are specifically designed to not be bogged down during emergency periods with high congestion:

    https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/...
    Are WEAs text messages?

    No. Many providers have chosen to transmit WEAs using a technology that is separate and different from voice calls and SMS text messages. This technology ensures that emergency alerts will not get stuck in highly congested areas, which can happen with standard mobile voice and texting services.

    So having FM radio for emergency broadcasts would be good. But we already have emergency broadcasts using our cell phones - even the ones like mine that do not have an FM chip. The argument for carriers to unlock because it's a security concern seems a bit like fearmongering. It might just work, and I would applaud if all carriers unlocked the chips so we can use them. But we did sign contracts with our carriers when we bought the phones, and they control what we can do, so I'm not sure what leg we have to stand on. Unless you paid full price and bought an unlocked phone.