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Comment by lormayna | Hacker News Reader

I always ask myself why no any cellphone producer is making a phone with 2m/70cm capabilities.

I used to ask the same thing back when car stereos were all the rage --- I wondered why I couldn't get shortwave or SSB or Air/VHF reception and the answer lies in use-case. Yeah, you and I might eat up this super niche product, but the market on the whole would not. Just look at what electric car makers are doing with AM radio. They're saying "screw RFI problems, we'll not filter those and just remove AM reception from the car radio because who needs that?" The answer is a larger slice of the population than would want other radio services. Even Apple never enabled the FM receiver feature on their chips from Qualcomm. It's all about the time spend designing it, ensuring it doesn't cause issues with must-have features, is intuitive to access/use, _and_ aligns with buyer demands.

With ham radio making up less than 1% of most countries' populations, the need just isn't there. (Most folks you talk to are doing good just to even be aware of ham radio, let alone actually be a ham.)

Sim card radios exist.

eg https://www.wouxun.com/radios/two_way_radio_kg-v98.aspx

Yes, but think about having a mobile that has native integration with APRS or can make voice/packet radio or even DMR. It would be perfect for hiking or adventures. Even better with LORA.

Probably the main issue is RF compatibility.

LTE over satellite is going to be the solution, as all existing 4g phones can do it.

I wish they would get LTE/5G peer to peer working. It is defined in spec but barely anything supports it. Then could do any networking instead of limited to ham radio.

CBRS frequencies might work for that.

forgive my ignorance here please, but I've read about APRS on and off for a few years and always wondered what I'd need to just transmit some data that would eventually make it's way to the internet. I recently suggested it to a Ornithologist friend doing back country research in South Afrika too.

But why are there no regularly recommended cheap hardware solutions that can do this (and or just hobbyist builds using an RPI). Seems like the demand would be there but perhaps I'm just not understand all thats involved.

Any insight you could provide would be appreciated.

APRS is actually pretty simple protocol. Data is encoded by modulating tones in a human's hearing spectrum, so if you tuned into the APRS frequency with any-purpose scanner (like most Baofengs), you would hear your childhood if you are old enough to remember 52k modems. The sound wave is easy to decode and encode with software. There are plenty of programs (Linux even has dedicated kernel modules) which turn your sound card into a modem, and the missing piece is the radio.

Now, there are different approaches. If your goal is to receive only, you can plug the headphone output of the cheapest Baofeng scanner into the microphone input of your PC, run the software, and you will start seeing messages soon. If you want to transmit, you do the opposite, but you must somehow automatically enable transmission on the radio when the program wants to transmit; there are different methods of doing so, depending on the radio. Basically, you can use anything what can receive and/or transmit audio on 2m bands. Such devices are cheap and easy to buy, so people probably don't bother with assembling a dedicated hardware. Just plug it to the computer.

It's even simpler if you have an HT with a Bluetooth KISS TNC. You just pair the radio to an Android device, and run APRSDroid and off you go. No cables or configuration of a PC needed.

The B-tech UV-PRO and VGC VR-N76 just got firmware updates that allow that. So now you can do it with a $180 radio instead of needing to buy a $900 Kenwood.

thanks for the detailed answer, so following your explanation if I wanted to transmit scientific data at regular intervals (for my friends field work) what sort of licensing / permission would I need?

Funnily enough someone posted down a few comments here almost exactly what I had complained about not existing ( http://www.mobilinkd.com/ ) at least if I understand that page correctly.

They do exist, I've seen several but as an example a DMR UHF Android phone: https://www.unihertz.com/products/atom-xl and the older https://www.anyradios.com/product/runbo-e81-dual-band-4g-dmr...

Do they need a simcard with an active plan or aNy simcard just works !!??

Don't believe it needs a simcard for UHF/VHF.

Even without a simcard, emergency numbers should still work if in range of a cell tower. IIRC that's a requirement of all 4g devices.

What's even more amazing, the local search and rescue helicopters have been outfitted with special 4G/5G base stations. So if they are flying a rescue mission in the mountain or other remote areas, and they come in range of your phone, not only does your phone suddenly have coverage, but they can see you connect, triangulate your position, and call/text you directly.

That is kind of cool. I did not know such a thing existed.

They exist but they are no-name brands. The phone is crappy, the radio is crappy, and the combo is a big brick. It would be awkward phone with antenna sticking out.

The question is why don't handheld radios have Bluetooth and USB-C data (some have USB-C power).

This!

Only recently are some of the cheap radio brands coming with USB c charging. I'd love built in Bluetooth pairing.

The common workaround for FM radio was to use the wired earphones plugged into the phone as an antenna. But FM radio is usually extremely, unbelievably strong (a lot of hams know that), so YMMV for other bands with much lower power signals.

That and an average headphone wire being somewhere around 3ish feet is pretty close to a quarter wave for commercial FM frequencies.

The Ulefone Armor 26 is available with a built-in UHF/VHF transceiver, but the software isn't great.

The opposite trend is radically changing business radio - a lot of devices that look like VHF/UHF transceivers are just cellphones. There just aren't a lot of environments where VHF repeaters provide more reliable coverage than LTE & WiFi.

I recently dug up my old iPod Nano 5th gen (small square one) from 2010 and charged it up, and still works fine.

What I forgot, and it totally surprised me, is that it has FM radio! I selected some stations and it worked great. And that Nano was tiny, would be cool to have this feature back in current iPhones / Apple Watches. I know it’s not the same as having full tx/rx on the 2m/70cm bands, but still, even just just listening to normal radio on iPhone would be cool.

I remember that my HTC Desire Z Android phone, and possible also the iteration of a Nexus Android phone that I later owned, had FM Radio. It was relatively common back then, and I made use of it almost every day on my bike commute and such.

They used the (wired) earphones plugged into them as an FM antenna, worked well enough.

I miss those days :’

How's the battery life after so many years?

I recently found my old e-reader (Kindle Keyboard) from 2011 and the first thing I had to do was swap a new battery in, the old one would not hold a charge for too long.

I haven’t played with it long enough, need to check again.

I’m also happy and surprised that all my music files are there and that everything works. I haven’t touched it in probably 4+ years, and was under the impression that flash memory, especially older generation like 2010, can degrade / bitrot if it’s not powered every so often.

> And that Nano was tiny, would be cool to have this feature back in current iPhones / Apple Watches.

That iPod used its headphone cables as the radio antenna. There's no easy way around that for a SmartWatch, and most people wouldn't be happy to carry a USB-C antenna dongle around with them for their iPhone.

You can of course start doing black RF magic with more compact antenna designs, but that's much more complex and still has a much larger footprint on the board than the FM receiver in that iPod nano has.

Ohh right yeah, I remember once reading about the headphone-cable-is-antenna, clever! I guess that’s why we don’t see it anymore in devices, as everyone is using more wireless headphones.

I know very little about antenna technology, but physics might play a role. 2m/70cm is pretty far away from the few-cm-wavelengths of somewhat modern cellphones (70cm a bit less so). For FM radio, the common workaround was to use the cable of plugged in wired earphones as antenna, but I don't know how well that would work for bands where the transmitters aren't as unbelievably strong as they are for FM radio.

And then there's of course the fact that almost nobody is asking for that, so the engineering and maintenance effort behind it would be insane in comparison.

If you can parlay it into an 1/8 wavelength, 25cm is probably not impossible to fit into some monstrously meandered beast that could fit in a phone's footprint. We've come a long way in terms of miniaturizing antennas, though I'm no expert.

But I think your second point hits the nail on the head - cell phones have enough antennas in them, and asking to add another one at such a low frequency is a great way to get your antenna and QA teams to look for a more sane employer, and to put your EMC compliance partner's kids through college :)

Flipper Zero capability in an iPhone + legacy auto app to move my keyless fob onto phone would be a killer.

Imagine all the data they could collect. I would probably even buy a subscription!

There's a small company called rfinded that's doing exactly that, but they're expensive and bulky.

Anyone that has a real need for something like that is either using either very specialized (and expensive) hardware, or some peripheral solution like TFA. We already have general purpose, mass produced devices that benefit from huge scale, and there's no such scale in amateur radio.

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