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Phones should have FM radio again
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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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As a ham, ugh.
I dream of it being more common to have radios in everyone's pocket, but it needs to be accompanied by some level of education on how to use it.
Maybe the price of the transceivers would go down, at least, lol. I have a general license and I just mess around with a Baofeng for the most part because I cannot justify buying a better radio. Tempted to get a QCX-mini or Pixie kit for a project... Unfortunately the like... $1000+ transceivers are just way out of budget for me, and I'm not sure I'd get enough use out of it to warrant the expense.
I hear you. I have a handful of HT's, all are 2m/70cm, same as the baofeng's... I have an alinco and an ailunce, plus two baofeng's. I picked up a small 20W mobile unit for my car, around $100 or so, all told, plus an antenna. Maybe $150 for everything? A little less?
I've been looking at the software defined radios on Ali Express for HF stuff, all low power. I think less than 10W, but you can go global on 10W on the right band with the right conditions. They're usually up for around $350 USD? They're small too. Good for POTA. I think they can go from 6m up to 40m. Something from the big brands that can do that is usually in the 1200+ range. I think that's similar to what you're talking about. Someone local here that I've met has one and he's been lighting up parks constantly with it.
I want to experiment with DMR more. My next project is to build a hot spot, since the closest DMR repeater tower is a bit too far to pick up. I can sometimes get it at the lakefront (it's across Lake Ontario from me, in Toronto VE3WOO if I recall correctly), and I'm in the Niagara area.
I would like to get a DMR repeater in the area and I've been talking to a local club about it. So it may just be a matter of time. In any case I'm weird. I use FM a lot still since that's what all the VHF and UHF stuff around here uses. There's some fusion/dstar stuff but no DMR.
I'd imagine no phone would have transmission ability, or at most transmit like a Walkie talkie
There are some ham radio call phones that can transmit. They're pretty specialized and not cheap, but they exist.... around $1200 for what is essentially 3+ year old phone hardware (with software to match .... Android 9-ish) with a built in transceiver... I like the idea, but I'm not paying that much for a very old phone because it happens to have a ham radio built in.
The current ideas with adding radios to phones is almost entirely to pick up broadcast radio, like am/FM. Nothing fancy.