full digtial AM test proposed for IBOC

[Casey]

The 4G networks are not congested and a 32kbps aac+ stream will not make a difference for 3G networks.

The 4G networks aren't anywhere close to being ubiquitous at this point. My carrier doesn't even have ANY 4G rolled out yet. And speaking of them, that 32 kbps AAC+ stream sounds good but their 3G is incapable of handing it for more than a few minutes on average. I think my record between dropouts is 15 minutes over about 13 miles.

This is something the technorati fail to consider when it comes to streaming everything everywhere: no matter what city you're in, everyone is spread out across multiple carriers and one or more of them will have serious coverage or connectivity issues that will render the ability to listen to any one audio stream null at any given time. Depending on streaming radio as "the future" or wireless audio is a really, really bad idea.

Frankly everyone I know in real life seems to share my belief of "streaming is great but it isn't worth the $100 a month the most reliable carriers charge for near-unlimited internet access." Free radio simply works better and works everywhere, even in the deepest woods of the national forest. Even HD radio is a better option than depending on 3G in many parts of the country and worrying about hitting your bandwidth cap. A 32 kbps stream is not a huge data hog but on top of everything else we do with our phones (photos, videos, games, etc.) it's easy to hit the 2 GB cap most carriers have implemented.

Depends on the carrier. My carrier, US Cellular, has 4G all over the place and where they don't they will over the next 2 years. Same goes for Verizon. At&t is a playing things a little slow, Sprint/Clear are essentially tearing things down and starting over and T-mobile has yet to even start, but 4G in general is growing nicely.

Broadcast radio coverage versus mobile network coverage is debatable. In larger cities mobiles networks are often on par and usually better than AM due to the interference AM suffers from. Night is another story and mobile networks usually come out ahead from my experience unless you are close to a big station. FM will usually win. However, some mobile networks are really good. Where I live the reception from US Cellular is spectacular. I can go in the middle of a field or forest in the middle of nowhere without a problem. I can even get 3G out there. The only place I lose reception is strangely enough in Target.

 

[rbrucecarter5]

With current smart phones, the AM-FM, or digital radio broadcast receiver is nothing more than another cheap app that requires inexpensive additional hardware in the form of an antenna. To a person carrying it, its value as a radio receiver in a disaster could be priceless and life saving. The whole point is to offer people with nothing but a cell phone the ability to make use of the broadcast system when the cell phone system is down, and it can be done for pennies a unit.

That simply isn't true. There is nothing inexpensive about changing an entire design of a phone to fit in a ferrite rod antenna
needed for AM. To receive FM you need an external wire, usually the headset used for the phone. How many people carry that on them and will have it when an emergency strikes? Almost none. Without some sort of antenna, you do not have a radio. And this assumes you even have a charged cell phone battery. If you don't and the power goes out, very few people have a way of charging their phone by other means, making them useless.

The expensive CEA and cell carrier lobbyists may have succeed in quashing this concept, but that will only increase the pressure for the cell system to always be up and running at peak capacity, and it will have more fingers pointed at it when it fails to provide its uniquely dependent customers the information streams they need in a disaster. It won't be the first time an industry has had to learn the hard way about being penny-wise and multi-million dollar foolish.

There will always be fingers pointed when a network goes down. But there won't be any more fingers pointed because of the lack of integrated radio. Most people do not even know this whole debate has been occurring. And if a person does not carry a pocket radio or have some sort of other access to emergency information, that is not the carriers problem. Just like how it won't be the carriers problem when people realize their emergency crank radios do not work because they let the battery completely discharge for an extended period of time.

Well, a lot of people will find out the hard way that their crank radios are fried in the event of a major asteroid / comet strike, because they will produce a natural EMP event. So would a really big solar flare, and so would a nuke if the infidels over there in the Middle East start lobbing nukes at us. I have a couple of really good multiband AM FM SW radios in old lead "filmshields" from the film camera era when people were worried airport X-rays would mess up film. The lead may be thin, but it will dissipate the worst EMP that could realistically happen. And if that fails, I have plenty of tube radios and a generator to run them. That either makes me a radio collector who happened to have old filmshields, or a totally paranoid disaster preparer. Either way I am in the distinct minority, most radios and cell phones will be instantly useless in the event of a major disaster. The Internet is fragile and would be the first thing to go. 3G depends on the cell phone network, which would not survive EMP, and which would be down in hours or days at best when backup batteries at cell sites go down. But good old radio - assuming the transmitters weren't all fried, would continue to work and work quite well. Given the proliferation of stations out there, a few of them might survive a major disaster and getting the rest going again would probably be a priority for government relief agencies trying to reach desperate survivors.

As far as putting a radio in cell phones, everything but the antennas had better be integrated in an IC. Looking at a tech page for a pocket radio:

http://earmark.net/gesr/srf59.htm

- going down to step 9 to get a good look inside - the ferrite bar is still pretty big. Granted this is an AM DX monster, so the ferrite could be made smaller and still work. But that leaves the tuning capacitor and a bunch of coils - assuming you could even get Sony to cut loose of this proprietary IC to put into phones. No - this isn't a good solution. Only Silabs chips that integrate absolutely everything except the antenna would do. Or make the Silabs technology a cell (IC term) to put into larger IC's already in the phone.

http://www.silabs.com/products/audiovideo/amfmreceivers/Pages/Si473031.aspx

But those pesky antennas! You need at least 3.1 inches for any sort of efficiency on FM - the longer the better until an "optimum" 31 inches. You could squeeze a lot of inches into a phone with a fractal antenna, but you better get it as close to 31 inches of length as you can or it will be most efficient where you don't want it- smack in the middle of cell phone frequencies. AM, as discussed earlier, could be a single loop trace on the PC board and probably work for local stations only. But you better think twice about doing it, because that loop would be wrapped around one of the noisiest RF environments imaginable - a cell phone. But - maybe. The idea of putting HD into either band is ridiculous, given the fragile nature of reception. If you somehow managed to get an AM tuner in there that didn't receive the noise, it would be so insensitive you'd never get HD lock, and pretty much the same is true for FM.

I'd say FM is remotely feasible, if it could be done for pennies more and didn't bother with HD. But AM - well - I carry an SRF-59 around with me. It is a hassle carrying two devices instead of one, but each one is optimized for the job it is designed to do, and doesn't try to be the other. I'd say they are mutually exclusive and incompatible at worst, and the radio is severely compromised by the cell phone environment at best. I sure don't get the SRF-59 near the cell phone when I am using it - the RF trash like the GSM tones is horrific.