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Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

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Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#261

Post by thaumasiotes »

DigitalJack wrote: post #247
jon-wood wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the BBC have such a wide range of music stations I can never comprehend why commercial radio is still a thing, and still so popular here. I'm probably not the target market though, since I also get irritated at the way all radio stations have about 15 minutes of music per hour, and the rest is filler from some smug DJ pretending to be your friend, and people calling in because they've got no one better to talk t…

I can't speak for the UK market, but in the US, public radio is biased left. I'm biased right, so it annoys me, but I love the stuff that isn't political, like Click'n'Clack (did that come back or is it being rebroadcast?). Commercial Radio has a non-government business benefactor, and so they cover what is of interest to them. Public Radio has government as it's benefactor, and so they cover their interests. Now it'…

> This difficulty is as old as the bible (cf Matthew 7:3), and probably as old as thinking (I haven't read Plato or Aristotle but I would be surprised if they didn't talk about it.)

I like to imagine that some thinking took place before Plato.

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#262

Post by DigitalJack »

emodendroket wrote: post #252
DigitalJack wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for the UK market, but in the US, public radio is biased left. I'm biased right, so it annoys me, but I love the stuff that isn't political, like Click'n'Clack (did that come back or is it being rebroadcast?). Commercial Radio has a non-government business benefactor, and so they cover what is of interest to them. Public Radio has government as it's benefactor, and so they cover their interests. Now it'…

There are no new episodes of Car Talk being recorded since the brothers both retired and one of them is dead.

That's sad. Now that you brought it up I think I remember hearing about one of the brothers dying. They were so much fun to listen to, really made me smile.

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#263

Post by DigitalJack »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #261
DigitalJack wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for the UK market, but in the US, public radio is biased left. I'm biased right, so it annoys me, but I love the stuff that isn't political, like Click'n'Clack (did that come back or is it being rebroadcast?). Commercial Radio has a non-government business benefactor, and so they cover what is of interest to them. Public Radio has government as it's benefactor, and so they cover their interests. Now it'…

> This difficulty is as old as the bible (cf Matthew 7:3), and probably as old as thinking (I haven't read Plato or Aristotle but I would be surprised if they didn't talk about it.) I like to imagine that some thinking took place before Plato.

What is stopping you?

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#264

Post by pklausler »

panglott wrote: post #244
therein wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only listen to KQED/NPR on the radio and donate to them as well. Ad-free, and really high quality content. I actually look forward to a lot of their programs in the morning.

Not ad-free, but the ads are not intrusive. Pledge week is still annoying of course.

Not to mention the decline of the vocal quality, too. God, those horrible vocal fries are pervasive now. (And no, it's not just the young or just the women.)

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#265

Post by jandrese »

forgetsusername wrote: post #237
Frondo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, I really like listening to a number of local stations for the variety of music I get introduced to; but somehow, the fact that there is a real person curating it makes me enjoy it. Listening to spotify, it doesn't do it for me. Something about having someone come on, make a little human conversation, that's part of the experience for me. Algorithms don't cut it.

> the fact that there is a real person curating it makes me enjoy it. You're lucky, I suppose. Around here every radio station is owned by the same media conglomerate, so we have 4 or 5 stations all playing the same generic top 40 music (with a slight variance by genre). Outside of the CBC, terrestrial radio, for the most part, sucks.

Yeah, around here commercial radio means ClearChannel, which means it's run by robots.

Of course there is satellite radio, but it turns out that's all ClearChannel too so no improvement.

All of the locally owned/operated radio stations were bought out many years ago. It's just cheaper to have programming piped in from the corporate headquarters instead of hiring local DJs.

The only terrestrial radio I listen to now is NPR, and even they have some issues.

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#266

Post by jandrese »

blowski wrote: post #113

> [On the iPhone 6] the wireless chip is a Murata 339S0228 which houses the normal flavors of 802.11 wifi, Bluetooth, and has an FM transceiver. ... > What we're missing is an appropriate antenna and an amplifier chip dedicated to driving that antenna. Unlike the murata chip that doesn't take up any extra space, those things /would/ take up extra space in the phone. While I'm of the opinion that Apple could have fitt…

Apple is obsessive about using every square mm inside of an iPhone case. I can definitely see them saying "that chip would take up room we don't have for a feature few people ask for", and drop it from the design.

The next version of the iPhone probably won't even have the headphone jack so there won't even be the possibility of using the headphone jack antenna trick. Not unless they engineer it into the lightning connector (ha!).

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#267

Post by ChuckMcM »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #155
ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of their war on adblockers. In the past the adblocker nag has popped after you scroll down, well an autoplay video will get you scrolling to find out where it is and blam they pop the adblocker. Of course none of that happens if you hit 'reader view' in Firefox, nice easy to read article. Its one of the reasons I've stopped reading Fortune and Wired web articles.

Wrong answer. I don't have an adblocker, yet I have too got an auto-play video with very loud sound.

Collateral damage?

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#268

Post by phkahler »

zenexer wrote: post #34

To anyone who's been able to get this to work: can the radios be tuned to arbitrary frequencies, or are they restricted to entertainment? A cheap, unlocked Android phone would make for a nice police scanner. Trunking could likely be handled via an app.

It would also be nice to get the aviation band which is just above FM at ~120 MHz range.

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#269

Post by jandrese »

CarolineW wrote: post #72

Doing a quick search has surfaced an item on this issue from a year ago. That article had this: But Jot Carpenter, vice president of government affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association, resists the move to turn on the FM chip. At a NAB convention in Las Vegas this week, Carpenter said there would have to be demand by smartphone consumers for mobile carriers to consider switching on the FM chip. "What Americans reall…

I'd like to tell him to stop telling me what I want.

And also maybe to recognize that cell data is expensive and overages can be punitive.

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#270

Post by nameless912 »

mtreis86 wrote: post #181
jrockway wrote: post #42

More interesting would be getting the weather radio signal (not on the FM broadcast band, it's AM around 160MHz), and having the phone change which SAME code it's sensitive to as you move around. I know you are supposed to get an SMS or something whenever there is a severe weather event, but after a million amber alerts and a flood warning a few states away, that's the first thing I turn off when I get a new phone. I…

I wish a flagship phone would come with an SDR built into it. You can currently get a rtl-sdr to work with a phone through http://sdrtouch.com/ but that requires an external chip. I want a phone with a SDR, and an FPGA so I don't need to run the samples through the cpu for filtering. An rf-hacker phone. Someone make this, please.

The market for this is hilariously vanishingly small. There's no way anyone would ever manufacture this at scale for the 1% of 1% of people who even know what SDR is.
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