Well put, Ed... In my own case, when I am stationary at work, my smartphone accesses my company's wifi network, so I am not consuming data plan minutes; as we all know, FM reception inside today's "Faraday cages" can be iffy even in the best of situations, so for me it's a no-brainer.
R. On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 4:37 PM, bernieS <[email protected]> wrote: > The radio broadcast industry's efforts to get FM broadcast band receivers > into cell phones has been unsuccessful. The wireless carriers who subsidize > the phone costs (with revenues from expensive multi-year phone contracts) > control the phones' feature sets and have little to gain from adding this > feature and increasing their handset prices. > > A couple of years ago, radio broadcast industry lobbyists tied to do an > end-run by lobbying Congress to mandate FCC type-acceptance of U.S. cell > phones to include an FM broadcast receiver--using the justification it would > enhance Homeland Security (EAS messaging when mobile networks are overloaded > with traffic.) But that effort went nowhere as well. > > These days smartphone users simply download the audio stream of the radio > station they want to hear on their smart phone, using their mobile carrier's > 3G or 4G data networks. It's not radio broadcasting, it's not free to > receive, and it's not efficient--but it's the direction the radio > broadcasting market is headed. My Irish attorney listens to an Irish radio > station in his car through his iPhone, which sends the audio via Bluetooth > to his car stereo. It sounds great, and he can afford the wireless mobile > data charges. > _______________________________________________ Swlfest mailing list [email protected] http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/swlfest To unsubscribe: Send an E-mail to [email protected]?subject=unsubscribe, or visit the URL shown above. For more information on the Fest, visit: http://www.swlfest.com http://swlfest.blogspot.com
