Phones should have FM radio again (as an emergency safety feature)
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I didn't even realize Qualcomm removed the built in FM radio from their chips. Huh.
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I didn't even realize Qualcomm removed the built in FM radio from their chips. Huh.
While not a physical radio, a Linux phone such as the Librem 5 in conjunction with an RTL-SDR dongle and external antenna may be a good candidate for a mobile software-defined radio (SDR) transceiver.
SDR frameworks such as GNUradio or REDHAWK are well-established by this point. Newer versions of REDHAWK are designed to run on CentOS/Rocky Linux, however, and they don't (AFAIK) come with a mobile-friendly UI.
I do know that there are some web-based SDR tools in the wild. I'm not very familiar with them, their system requirements/capabilities/limitations, but they could be worth a look to jump-start a Progressive Web App for mobile devices.
Or basically any Android with OTG support. There's a bunch of SDR software also available on Android. SDR++, SatDump, SDRAngel, Welle.io, Dump1090,...
But obviously, a proper GNU+Linux phone will do better.
SDR is neat but will be awfully power-inefficient, and if one is thinking of an emergency situation where one has to receive information and even the cell system is down, I would wager that being concerned about power usage on a cell phone is probably also going to be a factor.
My sister and some friends once were out in the forest and managed to get get themselves lost, out of sight of civilization but within cell range. The very first thing that the sheriff told them to do was to turn off all but one cell phone that they had with them, to maximize their battery lifetime. I suspect that that's probably standard advice from law enforcement, and the situation there was a lot-less of a major emergency than a loss of the cell network would be.
GPS works anywhere on earth and doesn't require a cell connection, it even works in airplane mode, so you really can't get lost if you have the maps app (which you probably do)
IF you have the local maps downloaded.
Mapping apps like Magic Earth are a lot faster than Google Maps, especially when outside good cell coverage, and it's easy to download maps in advance for wherever you're going to be.
Yeah, this was years back when people were running around with candy bar phones. I'm not saying "you need this to deal with getting lost", but rather just that running out of power is a concern.