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Absolutely right! I work as a part time firefighter and summer -18 we had exactly that problem. FM Radio can save lifes!
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LoRa could easily replace such. As it is, 2G coverage should be good enough. Government here uses C2000 and other frequencies with success.
If you have 2G, something like http://wttr.in or using the Python library they mention should work quite quickly. Without costing much data.
If you don’t have 2G, well, I consider that a problem. It means you can’t dial 911/112 whilst biking. A serious problem in our day and age.
I’d love it if the Fairphone had a LoRa (or better yet, SDR) transmitter. But alas, no.
Did I understand the comments correctly here that the chipset in the FP2 does have an FM radio, it’s just that we don’t have drivers for it?
I really, really miss that feature! That was truly a nice hack.
I beg to differ. There are many low-power FM radios and transmitters that are quite useful out there… 
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True, well, SDRs I am aware of have interfaces such as USB-A (USB 2 and USB 3), and IIRC also PCI-E. A Fairphone would not give enough output. Perhaps with a USB OTG cable and a powerbank? Because there are SDR applications available in F-Droid. There’s even the ability to use a Proxmark with software from F-Droid and Google Play.
Yes, but if you remember, range was short, you had to manually enable the hack, and well there is no privacy; only security through obscurity.
Which? Cause if you do that here, you get AT on your doorstep with a massive fine. Days of radio pirates are over. And, they’re not necessary anymore. Just a bunch of people high on nostalgia, really.
Well, if the 3G/5G stations are burning or are out of electricity (for days), you probably won’t have 2G either…
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That depends on factors. LoRa is very energy efficient; it also does not send/receive much data packets though. The reason I mentioned it, is not to say it should be part of Fairphone, but rather that it can be used as a means of communication.
2G tower have backup batteries. When my neighborhood lost power, I kept having 2G voice, but 2G data was overburdened rather quickly. Either way, you could set this up with SDR. All you need is a transreceiver. With SDR being on the rise, this only becomes more and more common. Another option could be beaming a signal (e.g. WLAN). Which could, if done right, result in very quick data transfers. You could even exfiltrate data this way. Including passing fires the “3G/5G stations”.
Well, the problem with forest fires is, that they can damage the towers.
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and they damage power lines which are needed for the towers. Most towers have some battery backup power for 6h up to 48h, but if the power is out for longer, cellphone invariantly goes down, too.
I think that was an issue in California this year with the “voluntary power outages” to prevent fires, resulting in a situation where the cellphone network is already down by the time a fire brakes out.
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Well, maybe Fairphone should send a product manager to Australia later this year…
This is wrong in so many ways…
Radio transmissions are the purest form of free communication, you can build yourself a radio even without any power source, there’s no intermediary between source and destination, no proxy, no providers, no corporate or government based censorship.
Radios have a long history of providing free speech in war zones or illiberal countries.
In fact, the pure fact that FM radios have been removed from smartphones just because they interfer with the online paid services, proves the point.
Edit: Fixed the quote.
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Right, fixed it, sorry about that. Don’t know why I screwed the quotes…
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I said FM. I wasn’t talking about AM or SM, though I’d make a similar point about these.
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You say “radio transmission”. That’s more broad. WLAN, LTE, NFC, BT, are all “radio transmissions”. Furthermore, the same counts for “ethernet” and “fiber”. They’re all the “purest form of comm” because they provide the infrastructure for communication.
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Furthermore, of these, you need a license to operate on FM (same for LTE, actually, but it does not cover the content). In NL, AT hunts you down and gives you a massive fine if you don’t have a license (orig. “ether pirates”). I used to be pro such freedom of expression, but nowadays we have much better forms of comm.
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SM, such as 27MC, has no cryptography applied. This meant in past, you could listen to comms such as taxi, police, fire dept, etc. Nowadays, they apply different protocols with cryptography. These have technical drawbacks, and also no longer can citizens snoop the traffic. Neither can criminals, though.
Yes, it sucks to break analog backwards compatibility, but as long as we use modular hardware (example: PC with USB) we can modify it to adhere to newer standards. As such, we can adapt to DVB-T2 (2008), and we can adapt to DAB+ (2007).
The question is: Why?
Another question is: Do we have alternatives?
Yes, FM/AM/SM was used in wars. In the war of Yugoslavia, it was used. Xs4all also provided dial-up services though. Were those then nor free? Of course they were, because it is comm infrastructure.
The internet, as it is, can also be used cheaply.
You have not proven the cause and effect of it being removed. That you claim it is some en masse fight against freedom of speech by smartphone manufacturers is a conspiracy theory at best.
I have one word which sums up your entire post: nostalgia.
While I agree with some of your points, I have to say, that - in my humble opinion - you didn’t prove @Soprano totally wrong.
There might be better ways of communication, but they are really more demanding than an FM/AM radio. Just take the number of antennas needed to distribute the signal for smartphones or the miles of landlines for internet.
Whenever there is a power-blackout, there is no internet, but still FM/AM radio.
This might well be.
Still, this is no argument against a FM radio.
Finally:
As long, as the FM radio is part of the SoC, there
- seems to be a broader demand for this feature and
- (in my opinion) should be a good reason not to enable it.
The reason may be licensing fees, but that’s just speculation. And since FP started off including the FM radio in the specs list, they should by now have clarified, why they dropped it. Well, in my opinion at least.
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You’re entitled to your opinion. I’m entitled to disagree.
There are also still other protocols which work then, such as SM, LoRa, 2G, WLAN (yes, WLAN, with directional antenna). WLAN doesn’t require a license, that’s a plus. SM requires a license already. To set up your own radio antenna isn’t very difficult; I’ve done it multiple times on World Scout Jamboree.
The problem with FM, though, is that the spectrum is very limited, and it is therefore one way traffic. Freedom of speech? Well, not in my opinion. Rather one-way communication from say public broadcasting stations to the people.
Sure.
That’s obvious, of course. You make it sound, like I said something different. 
Like are newspapers.
Since when does “freedom of speech” equal “freedom of discussion”?
It is included, but not mandatory.
Ok.
- SM - do you mean SW (short wave)? If you do, then it’s not really different from FM, or is it? I admit total ignorance here.
- LoRa - to my knowledge, that’s not yet available worldwide, even if the Netherlands already offer it nationwide (like Switzerland and South Korea). From what I read, it is directed at the IoT (Internet of Things i.e. SmartHome), so I have no idea, what gadgets exist, that make use of it as e.g. an information network.
- 2G - to my knowledge, this technology is turned off right now in various parts of the world; there are some threads about this in this forum.
- WLAN - from what I read, one can cross up to 100 km with a special directional antenna. That is hardly comparable to FM/AM radio, as you need the antenna and a free field between antennas. Obviously a mobile device is out of question, as any kind of movement with the antenna calls for readjustment.
Well, in the end, I guess, it is just a question of personal preference.
And while there are hundreds of FM-radio stations broadcasting their program worldwide, I have the feeling, that everyone is entitled to want to listen to them.
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Just for the record: I am making use of my entitlements to disagree with you and share BertG’s opinion. 
My disagreement’s main point is about that:
That’s a non-argument - even if one would agree with your points, non of them would justify that conclusion. Thought-terminating cliché - Wikipedia
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Thanks for the articulate answer. I quote only the last sentence because the discussion is going too much off topic.
I wouldn’t call it nostalgia. I listen to FM radio almost every time I’m in my car, and it’s also pretty useful when I travel to some country not covered by my GSM plan.
Don’t think we can have nostalgia for something we still regularly use.
I agree with you that internet may play that role as well, and often it does. But the downhill spirale of freedom in the www is not so encouraging.
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Right, which is a good reason I am happy with e.g. blogs. The internet, especially WWW, increased competition between news agencies massively.
Ah, freedom of discussion. A beautiful way to describe top-down information, and then the CEO lets his employees “discuss”, like with KPN recently. FM does not provide such alone, it would rely on PSTN for interaction with listeners. Now we can work around that, for example via an interactive chat.
Yes, short wave, like 27MC (CB). It is, it operates on different frequencies, and it has shorter range. In The Netherlands it has been superseded by C2000. These (or something akin to this) are actually what saved people, and still does. Not FM. I know that with 27MC you’re able to run telnet on it and actually use it akin to GPRS with a similar speed (~8 kbit / ~1 kbit).
Right. It can be used to share or receive data. Very low amounts of data. Far less than 27MC and 2G/GPRS.
That’s 3G. 2G is staying up (in Europe, at least). Everywhere in The Netherlands, there is 2G. Which gives GPRS at least, sometimes also higher (EDGE, 2.5G kinda). 3G is being put off though, Vodafone NL is going to put theirs off on Monday. However, the frequencies are going to be reused, for 4G. And because nowadays, a “modem” on a smartphone can RX/TX a bunch of frequencies regardless of the underlying technology, this won’t break smartphones’ data capabilities… if they can do 4G. If you can only do 3G, you can also do 2G, and that means you can only do 2G on Vodafone NL after Monday.
Correct, although 4G is going to be adequate while on the move, while 5G is going to be adequate on crowded positions. Ie. you’ll be able to stream Netflix on 1080p in such crowded places such as Utrecht, Amsterdam CS or Hamburg, Berlin CS.
You’re not able to reach these “hundreds”. If you have a FM frequency with long range, it means a lot of the band is going to be used, or it might be distorted by local stations. To combat that, for public broadcasting they used basically retransmitters/relays. Either way, the number of FM frequencies is limited, or their range is limited. It is a very crowded range…
It is incomparable with the internet as well, where the amount of choice is vastly more broad, plus real-time. It used to be, that you would dial-in into a radio show with a wired phone. Now you can do such with a cellphone (2G) or smartphone (VoLTE).
So, what do we have right now?
DAB+, DVB-T2 for digital radio and digital TV.
2G, 3G, 4G.
5G and WLAN for high speed traffic.
LPWAN (LoRa, NB-IoT, DASH7, …) and equiv for low speed, high range IoT.
2G can be used for emergencies just fine. 2G is deployed world-wide as it is.
The only reason FM stays in use, is backwards compatibility. I don’t mind if a company breaks backwards compatibility, provided there are better technologies available. Such is the case as it is. Else we’d have regulation from governments to keep FM on our smartphones, because gee a disaster might happen. You’ll know about that disaster, via your smartphone, with your Twitter client or whatever you use to follow the news. Or you get a WhatsApp message from your loved one if you’re well. Or a phone call. Or a SMS.