
Samsung is the latest OEM to unlock FM chips in new phones - artsandsci
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/samsung-will-start-unlocking-fm-radio-chips-in-new-phones/
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untog
Every now and then I wonder if we're making a mistake with the new tech we're
bringing in to replace radio and TV broadcasts. FM/UHF broadcasts scale
infinitely! There's something quite beautiful about them, technologically.

It's not difficult to imagine that in any kind of emergency scenario internet-
based broadcast systems will collapse. And maybe it's just me, but I always
found broadcast to be pretty reliable (or at least consistently unreliable in
ways I could predict) - online broadcasts have a tendency to fail/buffer/etc.
at totally random intervals.

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peatmoss
But how would advertisers know when you’re watching / listening? Broadcasts
will clearly never work!

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Retric
That's one reason radio stations often have contests. Having X number of
people call in demonstrates someone is listening.

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samfisher83
Its been on the US s8 ever since I got the phone. You just need nextRadio app
to use it.

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LeonM
Can't really tell if you are joking, or just don't know that phones have
actual FM receiver build in.

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samfisher83
I know they have FM receiver chips built in. They are built into the QCOM
chips. If you use the NextRadio app you can use the FM chip on the Radio to
tune into FM stations. I am not sure why I am getting downvoted for providing
some information.

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takeda
Yes, but even nextRadio won't help you if your chip functionality is
locked[1]. The article is talking about Samsung no longer locking it.

[1] AFAIK in that scenario nextRadio falls back on streaming over the
Internet, but we are not talking about that.

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cobbzilla
For emergency purposes I wonder how hard it is to include an AM receiver. AM
waves can travel much farther than FM. I'd guess it's one more part that adds
some marginal cost, and there's more music/fun stuff on FM.

~~~
samfisher83
AM has a much longer wavelength. AM is super simple. It is Amplitude
modulation. You take a signal and multiply it by a sinewave. The issue is you
need a bigger antenna, and probably need to block noise better since AM has
lot of issues with noise.

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dqv
Yay! I will _finally_ be able to listen to NPR on my phone without using data.

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balladeer
This would be my use case too. But data is extremely cheap here in India (as
of now at least; after Jio happened). My main concern was huge battery drain
while using data.

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pjmlp
All my J2ME, Symbian, Windows Phone and Android devices have FM radio, using
the headphones as antenna.

One just needs to make the right options and give money to OEMs that favour
us.

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reaperducer
It's always been strange to me that iPods had radios, but iPhones didn't.

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mrlyc
I'm confused. Both my Samsung Galaxy Ace GT-S5830T (January 2011) and Galaxy
Ace 3 GT-S7275Y (June 2013) phones came with an app called "FM Radio" that
works. They cost me $100 on sale. Why don't the more expensive ones have that
feature?

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overlordalex
Probably because you live outside of America - for some reason carriers in the
states block the FM chip on their phones.

"Your phone has an fm chip. So why can't you listen to the radio?"
[https://www.wired.com/2016/07/phones-fm-chips-radio-
smartpho...](https://www.wired.com/2016/07/phones-fm-chips-radio-smartphone/)

~~~
szatkus
Makes sense. In Europe all smartphones I had had FM Radio application. It
requires headphones, but it works.

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rkachowski
I'm not following too well.. what is the exact motivation for including FM
chips that are going to be disabled in the first place?

What series of events lead to FM capable hardware being incidentally included,
but disabled in modern smartphones?

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cesarb
> what is the exact motivation for including FM chips that are going to be
> disabled in the first place?

A single chip can do multiple things (WiFi, Bluetooth, FM, etc). For the chip
manufacturer, it's simpler and cheaper to provide a single version of the chip
with everything, and let the device manufacturer simply disable the unused
parts, than to provide several different versions of the chip, some with FM
and some without FM.

That is, the phone manufacturer decides "I want Bluetooth and WiFi", and the
chip they chose for that happened to also have FM. Since they won't use the FM
part of the chip, they don't even have to connect the "FM antenna input" pin,
saving the space on the board that would be used for the corresponding
trace(s) and passive components (which they also don't have to install,
reducing the costs).

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throw7
Both my parents cheap flip and small android phone have working FM tuners. The
headphones work as antennas and it's quite nice actually... I'm sitting there
with a >$500 "smart" phone and envious.

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pedrocr
If it's an Android phone it may be the case that installing a third party OS
like LineageOS will give you that ability back.

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gadders
Sadly this is only for SnapDragon based Samsung S8s. No good for my Exynos-
based version in the UK.

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tudorw
Any data broadcast potential there ? Localised FM data broadcasts might be fun
to mess around with.

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LeonM
You can, but it will be really, really slow. And one-way only of course.

HAM operators have been using that since the 80's (maybe earlier?),
broadcasting data, pictures (i.e. SSTV) or text (i.e. hellscreiber)

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aidenn0
FM radio is both wideband and very high power, so I imagine it should be able
to get at least 100kbps if you replaced the audio with trellis-modulated data,
though I'm sure the FCC wouldn't be very fond of that

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shams93
This is also great for safety often you only get disaster information from
radio and TV. In the event of a major earthquake or other disaster this could
be a life saver.

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ttsda
That's what's written in the article.

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phkahler
Can we get the aircraft band too? It's a little above the FM frequencies.

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ajosh
Aircraft bands use AM rather than FM because of the FM capture effect. When
there is a double transmission with FM, the receiver will lock on to one
signal and exclude the other. With AM, you will hear both as well as,
possibly, a heterodyne tone if the carriers aren't exactly the same frequency
which is much preferable.

FM demodulators can't really demodulate AM signals. AM demodulation can
demodulate FM by tuning a bit off the carrier frequency thanks to the fall-off
of the filters but the quality isn't great.

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Aloha
> FM demodulators can't really demodulate AM signals. AM demodulation can
> demodulate FM by tuning a bit off the carrier frequency thanks to the fall-
> off of the filters but the quality isn't great.

By "isn't great" you mean, "I might be able to understand something with a
tailwind, downhill" \- right? :-P

The mode of operation for an AM radio listening to FM is akin to a slope
detector.

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ramshanker
As long as there is Traffic on the Road, FM will have a demand. :D.

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Namrog84
Will autonomous cars with nothing but Netflix and other video streaming
services and no steering wheel also have fm radio?

I can easily forsee within my lifetime the banning of traditional human road
drivers.

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fasteddy760
Will require two things, a shift in vehicle insurance costs.

And the costs for personal insurance and fuel to be a barrier swaying public
interest.

There will still be a desire to drive, although falling out of popularity
including stigma against "drivers" who less safe than the systems designed to
protect passengers, but are willing to pay for the pleasure.

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Bromskloss
Huh, the Samsungs people around me have had have had FM receivers for years.
Did they disable them and then enable them again?

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lgats
Guess it's a good time to buy some IHRT

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gumby
Feels like the people who still listen to radio are the people who don’t have
smartphones: age-based. I only have one friend whom I know listens to the
radio, and that in his car.

I guess I just assume that radio is just for the elderly.

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pearle
Is 34 considered elderly? Asking for a friend..

Jokes aside, my girlfriend upgraded to a LG V30 specifically because I bought
one and discovered it had an enabled FM tuner by accident.

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pbhjpbhj
I've always had phones with FM receivers when possible. They're not rare (in
UK) - my Huawei has it, my wife's Samsung has it. In the past our LG and Sony
Ericsson phones had them.

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tinus_hn
Great for people clinging to obsolete technology. DAB+ does the same thing
with better audio quality, less spectrum usage and more possibilities.

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stordoff
In theory, yes[0], but DAB in the UK at least is tending towards low bitrate,
and often mono, streams -- see, e.g., [https://www.astra2sat.com/radio/uk-
digital-radio-bitrates/](https://www.astra2sat.com/radio/uk-digital-radio-
bitrates/)

[0] Personally I find FM preferable to HE-AAC, but it's just a different set
of trade-offs, not necessarily better.

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tinus_hn
Obviously there is a trade off, either you get a large amount of low quality
streams or a few high quality streams. You can do the same thing with FM, if
you only allow stations to transmit mono audio you can fit more. I don’t know
how many channels you get in the UK on FM vs. on DAB+ but it seems like the
list of digital stations in that link is longer than would be possible using
FM.

This all doesn’t change the fact that DAB+ uses the spectrum much more
effectively. Of course, on low bitrates you can learn to hear the artifacts.
Just as you can hear the distortions in FM. But you need less spectrum for a
stream where you can’t hear the artifacts.

There isn’t some big conspiracy selling you digital radio, it’s just better.

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pbhjpbhj
In the UK there was something of a "conspiracy" (misselling is probably more
like it) in that initially DAB was presented as high quality, giving a big
reason to buy in, but it was quickly downgraded in quality once momentum had
built for the change.

My impression is a simple radio set is now about 4 times what it was before
DAB, not sure where that fits in ...

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tinus_hn
The conspiracy, if you want to see it that way, is not about selling you the
devices but in dividing the spectrum differently so they have space for more
stations to sell.

An FM station uses some specified amount of spectrum and the government can
sell that space for the amount of money one station is willing to pay. If you
can change the system so more stations fit in the same amount of spectrum,
they get the amount all these stations together are willing to pay. So they
get more money with DAB. And it looks modern with more features to boot!

You can just solder an FM radio yourself from generic components and some wire
while a DAB radio requires a processor, which is obviously going to be more
expensive. I think all of the patents expired though so I don't think someone
is becoming rich by licensing the technology. At least the patents on the
audio codec have expired.

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pbhjpbhj
>not about selling you the devices but in dividing the spectrum differently //

The point there is that initially it was hard to sell DAB in the UK because FM
is pretty good, and very cheap. So people could only be convinced to buy DAB
because the channel width allowed much higher quality. My recollection is that
once momentum built on purchases then channel width was changed, making the
perceived quality similar .. but now radio sets cost a lot more. The
additional features don't really do anything for me, the only effective change
for me is that it takes much longer to tune to a new station.

The cost of the DAB processor can't really be so much, the quality increase
allowed prices to be anchored high; cheapest DAB is still 4x FM price, I can't
see that being all tech costs.

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tinus_hn
You can’t sell spectrum to broadcasting if the listeners don’t have receivers.

You can buy DAB (and DAB+) receivers directly from China if you want. They’re
still more expensive than FM receivers but then you can be sure there is no
shady conspiracy in your own country profiteering.

In fact, if you want you can buy a SDR device which gives you the data an
antenna would receive, and do the rest in software (both FM and DAB decoding).

