SPV C500 Fm Radio

[Guest dief00]

I know this is my 3-rd post and probably the 3-rd stupid one.

What i remeber when googeling for the SPV to see it's features,i saw some variants of SPV that had an FM Radio Tuner :shock: .

After buying mine i saw that mine had none so i did what every proud SPV owner wold do....call Orange. After a long wait and a verry polite welcome i asked about the Radio problem. The "orange lady" obviously didn't know about it and went asking the "tech" guys.

The answer was...No, there isn't any application for that but you can download it almost everywhere on the net.

3 month have passed and still no software found....so i figure there is none.

(have to mention that i'm on Orange Romania, and even if the coverage is good, the post sale services suck)

The question is...is there any FM Radion application :?:

http://www.dynamoo.com/moobiles/orange-spv-c500.shtml

http://www.slashphone.com/6/515.html

links that say that is sould have FM Radio or at some point that was the pls

Edited May 20, 2005 by dief00

[Guest SkUk21]

nope!

not one available that i know of!

[Guest bluesmudge]

not only that i think there are hardware boundaries that you'd need to get around - i don't think the current built in ariel would stoop to fm frequencies....

but if someone can proove us wrong on this i'd pay for this ;)

[Guest mossywell]

I know this is my 3-rd post and probably the 3-rd stupid one.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Quite the opposite - it's a very interesting question....

Technically, getting FM radio on a mobile would be a mammoth task. FM - Frequency Modulation - is where you take an analogue (and this is a key point) signal and modulate it based on the frequency to convey information. The total frequency spectrum is divided into small chunks known as bands or channels and each radio station then modulates their broadcast into their band and send it out to the big wide world. The receiving system simply listens in on this band and then modulates the signal back to audible sound. (AM, by the way, uses a similar system except that the frequency is kept constant and the amplitude is varied instead. Unfortunately, it is not possible to convery as much information this way per band, which is why only a single audio channel can be transmitted over an AM band, whereas FM can transmit two: left and right, hence stereo.)

Your phone doesn't have any hardware for listening to the FM airwaves - what is required is an FM receiver (a device for converting the signal in an FM band to audible sound) to do this and the phone simply does not have it. There is an other snag here:

The UK digital phone network (both voice and data) is digital, not analogue (it used to be analogue, interestingly). This means that specific information is encoded into 1's and 0s at one end, sent over a specific frequency to a specific device, and decoded at the other end. So, as well as the phone network being digital, you also have the problem that there is no sense of "listening to whatever is out there". Instead, what you listen to is only and exactly what is sent to the phone. To put it crudely, you could phone someone up, ask them to put on Virgin Radio for example, and listen to it - though of course it'll sound pants and cost a fortune :exclaim: This would be using the voice part of the digital network to transmit the audio.

One other way around this is to use the data part of the digital network (i.e. GPRS) and something like WMP or beta player (I'm guessing that they can do this as I've not actually tried) and connect to a web site that encodes the specific radio station that you wish to receive. If you're lucky, you may find a web site that encodes many different radio stations and allows you to pick the one that you want. Again, however, you are limited to what stations are encoded into a digital signal in the first place. (It'll also run up the GPRS bills. :shock: )

The best (and perhaps most expensive) solution is to get an unlimited GPRS tariff and set up a streaming server that encodes the radio station(s) that you want to listen to. Then simply connect to that, et voila! (You may also be subject to radio broadcasting laws as well - bit of a minefield really.)

HTH

[Guest Paraklas]

If I may suggest, there are dozens of FM receivers on ebay for C500/MPX220/200 etc that use the headset plug on the phone. So instead of having the FM receiver in the phone, you have it in the headset and you can change stations from there.

[Guest Swampie]

Quite the opposite - it's a very interesting question....

Technically, getting FM radio on a mobile would be a mammoth task.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Actually, its quite easy I think. There's plenty of mobiles out there which can receive FM radio broadcasts - eg. Sony Ericcsson K700i and Nokia 6230. Some use the headphone/headset lead as an aerial, meaning you can't use it for radio without the headsets which annoys some people.

D

[Guest Confucious]

When the C500 was first released Orange advertised it as having FM Radio - there are various threads on the subject. It does not have radio and the advertising literature was promptly changed when they realised their mistake.

AFAIK there is no s/ware or h/ware for the C500 to enable radio reception.

[Guest moosery]

When the C500 was first released Orange advertised it as having FM Radio - there are various threads on the subject. It does not have radio and the advertising literature was promptly changed when they realised their mistake.

AFAIK there is no s/ware or h/ware for the C500 to enable radio reception.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

indeed - what they didnt care to mention was that the 'Radio' operates at appx 2.45Ghz, and isn't free to tune into!

(they were referring to the 'radio stack' transmitter of the phone itself I believe..)

[Guest mossywell]

Actually, its quite easy I think.  There's plenty of mobiles out there which can receive FM radio broadcasts -

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

My typo - when I said getting radio on a mobile would be a mammoth task, I should have said "getting radio on the C500 would be a mammoth task". Someone did say that you could simply use an FM radio headset, but that's cheating. [-X Technically, if you do that you're bypassing the phone and going straight to the ears. ;)

I remember reading about the "radio" on the phone in the early literature. It's hard to know whether it was simply a mess up by the marketing department - "hey great, this phone has a radio, let's make it a key selling point", and all the techies going #-o

[Guest waroffice]

sure you could just buy a radio for a pound in a pound shop on your high street!?!?!?!