It’s not like you have to use it. My phone has it, I’ve used it to listen to local football games while camping. Worked great. Some people like to have the option to use it though.
Comment on Phones should have FM radio again
thantik@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I hate this idea. FM channels have more advertisements than they have music. And there’s no technical way (yet) that I know of to automatically block said advertisements. Advertisements have driven the world into madness, as now anything that requires them to stay profitable either jams them into everything, or has a huge focus on rage-bait in order to get people to listen/watch/click. This rage-bait has made our world more angry, more divisive, and more chaotic than ever. Fuck advertisers.
Frozengyro@lemmy.world 8 months ago
FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world 8 months ago
There are some channels that aren’t like this if you’re lucky enough to live in an area with something like NPR stations or donation funded music radio.
catfishsushi@midwest.social 8 months ago
I just built a website that makes it easy to find and stream community radio stations (which you refer to as ‘donation funded’) There are over 100 stations listed. Just choose from a drop-down and hit ‘play’. Looking for more beta testers AlternateAirwaves.com
FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Oh that’s awesome, thanks for doing that!
Ataraxia@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
The emergency channel has no ads…
cbarrick@lemmy.world 8 months ago
If you live near a University, tune in to the local student radio.
It’s usually run by the University without ads.
I rock out to WPTS radio in Pittsburgh and both WUOG and WPPP in Athens, GA.
grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I love our local university radio. They actually play jazz sometimes. It’s basically mindless pop, frozen in time 90s, or you can pick between new country and even newer country where I live.
danwardvs@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Our local college has an alternative rock station that radio students come on air. Minimal ads with great music and personalities.
Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Imma just leave this here: www.campus-fm.com
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 8 months ago
There is also WSOU in northern New Jersey. Seton Hall’s Pirate Radio.
PixxlMan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Oh no! Imagine being forced to have the option to listen to another form of communication!
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
I hate it when this hypothetical radio app downloads itself and turns itself on every time there’s a radio ad break!
Candybar121@lemmy.world 8 months ago
What, you don’t like watching 2x 15 second ads before every youtube video, which has 1 minute + dedicated to today’s sponsor?
ikidd@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Ublock Origin and SponsorBlock makes youtube bearable.
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
That’s not all radios for sure. For example the Bulgarian Radio 1 seems to be almost exclusively music. Sometimes there are advertisement blocks that are long, but usually it’s just music. Then there may be local stuff like college radios (e.g.: KGRG) that won’t have as many advertisements, if any. In Slovakia there used to be Rádio Anténa Rock that was also mostly music as well, but they shut down as it wasn’t profitable. They are now owned by Bauermedia and operate as “Rádio Rock” with only 3 low-power FM transmitters which barely cover 2 cities. At least they’re in DAB+.
Anyway, there are some radios that do not have as many advertisements.
elbarto777@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I could use public radio.
Haywire@lemm.ee 8 months ago
The reason they had FM in the past was because broadcasters lobbied for it to be a requirement.
scarabic@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’d like to listen to my local NPR station. It’s not an advertising nightmare.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The point of the article is to have them there for emergencies since we already have systems in place to broadcast emergency info over radio, and it’s a lot simpler to implement than satellite for when cell signal is down.
PeleSpirit@lemmy.world 8 months ago
And it’s way better than the xitter.
thantik@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I don’t see the necessity for FM Radio to be used for this. They’ve removed them from most of today’s phones, and adding them back would be just as complex as adding an even lower frequency radio like LoRa for emergency messages.
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
I’m a qualified amateur radio operator and I work in IT as my day job, if you can’t see how bad it would be to continue to put all our eggs into one basket for datacom, primarily in the hands of poorly regulated private cellphone companies, then I can’t really help you.
Fact is, 80-110 MHz FM requires less infrastructure (aka fewer broadcast points) to more completely cover an area, and it’s almost impossible to have it blocked by buildings/walls/vehicles, etc. Sure, the signal might go to shit, but it’s at least able to be heard even in very challenging conditions. It also takes nearly no power to run. Receiver chips can be made so small that it would be a trivial addition to make for most cellular manufacturers. There’s no licensing fees or service fees so the entire process is free from top to bottom.
Add that to the fact that it’s already deployed, regulated and configured for emergencies, and you have a very low implementation cost for a very reliable and robust service.
The idea here isn’t to add it so we can listen to FM commercials all day. Anyone I know who had FM on their cellphone, didn’t use it; and I won’t suggest that anyone will use it now… but if there’s a major catastrophe and the cellular networks go down, having a recieve-only way of getting emergency information to those who are otherwise disconnected from everything is a big deal. A lot of households are going digital only for their entertainment and getting rid of old stereos and hi-fi units with radio built in for all HDMI systems that make their Netflix work nicely. Many also have zero land line service so once the internet stops functioning and the cell towers go out, the only method of communication these people will have is standing on their porch and screaming into the void.
I’ve monitored communications during major outages, like sitting hurricane hits on the contental US and heard the radio traffic stating that there’s people at x location and all consumer/commercial communication systems are inoperable. The only thing working was an amateur owned and operated repeater network to relay the communication across the region; I was listening to an internet relay on the outskirts of the coverage area and it was clear that they would have had no outbound communication if they didn’t have those repeater nets. Inbound, I’m sure FM and AM radio was still operable, so anyone with an FM set could hear news and alerts as they happened.
Radio is also nearly instant, while LoRA mesh networks rely on people having nodes to relay the messages and the messages may be interrupted while a node is down. The first isn’t a thing yet, the second is difficult to do at best. Amateur FM cells can transmit over many miles potentially several dozen, meanwhile most LoRA can’t reach a fraction of that far, requiring a massively larger number of them, and each one is a potential point of failure.
With regulation, commercial broadcast FM sites are required by law to participate in the emergency broadcast system, no such regulation exists for LoRA.
Under normal operating conditions, FM is fairly useless, unless you feel like listening to ads, but in an emergency, it can be the only way for you to be told that, though the weather seems to have gotten better, it’s temporary and you should stay where you are.
All my handheld radio transceivers have commercial FM recievers built in, so either way, I’m covered. I also have several dedicated FM and shortwave receiving radios around. I have adequate communication capability for an emergency. I’m not perfectly set up, even remotely, but I’ll be able to reach out to someone if I’m without power, internet, cellphone coverage, etc, during a major event. I can call for help, get information about the situation and it’s duration, I can reach out over 10 miles or more to communicate with others, all with my handheld.
And you want to take all this infrastructure and preparedness that we as a society have developed over more than a century, and flush it all away… because why? You have a hard-on for LoRA? You think old tech is useless in today’s day and age? Because you have a problem with broadcast radio trying to survive, a service that’s free to you, by playing ads?
Do you realize how stupid you sound?
ioslife@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
Well this was a fun read and makes me want to be better prepared for a potential real emergency.
grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Most people won’t read until that last paragraph, ha ha.
Thanks for writing this up. I have always been concerned that my car is the nearest FM radio. I always kept a clock radio stashed in my basement “workshop” area but it was thrown out at some point along with the old rotary phone I had with it.
My son has a beginner electronics kit that can build a very low powered transmitter so I got him a cheap usb chargeable AM/FM receiver with an aux in, speaker, and headphone jack for next to nothing. The antenna is actually extendable and doesn’t suck. Going to stash it when he’s done with it. Could come in handy.
Haywire@lemm.ee 8 months ago
v81@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I think FM Broadcast is great, but with regard to phones aren’t we missing something here? For a phone to even receive FM broadcast headphones have to be plugged in, it’s been a requirement for any FM RX capable phone I’ve ever had, for antenna purposes. So with regard to the argument for mobiles to have FMrx if such functionality were to become common place we’d need to see the return of headphone jacks and people would need to be carrying corded headphones for it to function.
I think this capability is a great idea, but the limitations forced on us by losing the headphones socket as well as societys fascination with making everything wireless at any cost is a little concerning.
I’ve always considered average to good quality wired buds to be great, but it seems they really are on their way out.
Very_Bad_Janet@kbin.social 8 months ago
Whats a good emergency radio with a hand crank that you would recommend?
vox@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
in most cases radio is disabled by software + headlhone jack is no longer wired up as anthenna (some phones don’t have headphone jacks at all nowadays)
gayhitler420@lemm.ee 8 months ago
In addition to all that @MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca said, implementing an am or fm receiver on an existing device is as easy as plopping down one of the existing bga chips that has an antenna input and an audio output. here’s one of the bigger ones that needs a killer 3mm x 3mm land pattern. It’s also only $1.79 or so, which is expensive for an ic, but in the context of a phone wouldn’t contribute significantly to the cost of the device.
The need for an 1/8” out would be the worst part because ironically, phone jacks suck for uhh… phones.
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Thanks for the support gayhitler.
Haywire@lemm.ee 8 months ago
The broadcasters lobbied to have it mandated. Thats the only reason it was ever included.