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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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The components to make the phone able to decode FM radio take place. Which, in such small device, is valuable. If you really need FM radio for emergency situations, why not take a dedicated miniaturized FM radio receiver?
Not sure if this is still the case, but in the past the FM radio functionality essentially came "free" as part of either the SoC or modem. Since it used headphone wires as the antenna, the death of the headphone jack pretty much killed any purpose for including it.
There is no such thing as "free" functionality in hardware. Old SoC may have had this functionality, but it was at the cost of some die space, that has since been reclaimed by other function more useful to most users.
The functionality is, in fact, still there, and basically every phone with a headphone jack turns it on.
Modern SoCs still have it...
Further we've moved to Software Defined Radios in general... So it's all programmable.
Hence the quotations around "free". Qualcomm isn'tgoing to tape out a custom chip without it for you just because you don't want that block.
This was my uncertainty, do you know for certain that they don't include FM functionality on their chips anymore or are you just guessing? The public facing documentation is not exactly detailed enough to tell for sure.
No, but it's so immaterial it hasn't really been worth the effort to exclude it yet
FM radio was integrated in even smaller phones 20 years ago. And the tech to "decode the signal" is already present in today's phones. FM are radio signals, just like NFC, Wifi, Bluetooth and cellular.
Not the same radio frequencies, not the sames technologies (analog vs digital). Those radio hardware are very specialized, and won't work on frequencies or technologie they are not meant to.
Correct, not the same technologies. It's a much simpler circuitry. Very specialized doesn't mean very complex. A hammer is very specialized too.
I read somewhere that SoC boards on today's phones still have FM tuning capabilities, but they just don't use them.
I'll try to verify that, though.
Edit: this link seems promising: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-unlock-fm-radio-hidden-smartphone/