I have a super-small Sansa 8GB mp3 player that I bought specifically because it has an FM receiver, and will also record radio.
fitter
happier
more productive
has no freaking idea what this has to do with radio
It’s possible to do 99% of radio reception in software if you have an antenna, an ADC of sufficient quality to feed enough bits per second to the CPU, and a CPU fast enough to be a radio in addition to being a cell phone and Angry Birds game platform. Back not too long ago, the idea of getting a CPU that beefy into a phone would have been ludicrous, but this is The Future and things are different now. You can even cheat a bit and have the ADC partially tune the raw radio signal such that it only needs to feed the CPU a fraction of the data, but that data is sufficient for FM reception.
And radio broadcast, too. It doesn’t even take that much of a CPU!
I remember doing this with a radio set up near the cabinet for a CDC 3200 Mainframe, and running a program that would broadcast ‘music’ to the radio. And the CDC 3200 mainframe CPU was probably much less powerful than the chip in a digital wristwatch today, or even the controller for a wash machine. But you could broadcast with it!
Clever hack; I bet you couldn’t get very high-quality audio out of that setup, though, but I know pretty much how it would have worked.
I’m talking about GNU Radio or something very much like it; software-defined radio is the general term. You can in fact use that technology for broadcast as well as reception, but, as a practical matter, the FCC is a lot touchier about broadcast than reception.
Also, as a practical matter, it’s currently probably a lot cheaper to just get an FM radio-onna-chip and feed the CPU nice, clean, demodulated audio. Kinda kills the possibility of ever picking up an AM signal.
There have been products that incorporated terrestrial analogue and DVB TV and FM radio into smartphone handsets - I remember looking at one running windows Mobile 6.x about 4 years ago - and it looks like such things are still out there - but typically limited to weird unbranded devices from China (which may or may not deliver the promised features), or brands not common/popular/targeted in western markets.
I can read the New York Times on my iPhone. If that’s not “traditional media”, I don’t know what is.
If You don’t know then it can only be because you haven’t read the thread. I specifically asked about legacy portable media technologies in the sequence of broadcast radio, cassette, mp3 players etc.
Because it’s free, and doesn’t use internet data transfer.