On 18/6/24 15:07, Jacek Lipkowski via Developers wrote:
There are two other things that are very often present in modern radios: broadcast fm receiver and flashlight. We often make fun of that, but it's everywhere and it turns out people actually use that (yes, i was surprised too).
So what do you think about a standardized fm broadcast radio concept in chirp? (not sure about the flashlight 🙂
I wouldn't restrict ourselves to broadcast FM either.
I've owned several radios by Alinco, Kenwood and Yaesu that featured general-coverage MW/SW receivers and used to listen to both MW and SW stations on them.
My old Kenwood TH-F7E + whip antenna was quite good for picking up shortwave… and both the Alinco DJ-G7T¹ and Yaesu FT5-DR I have now both have quite decent ferrite bar antennas for MW reception.
All of these have quite reasonable wideband FM reception too. The old VX8-DR I had would even do it in stereo, as does the FTM-350AR I have.
¹ Gotcha being that the DJ-G7T is hard-coded to 10kHz frequency steps on MW, so you're at the mercy of the PLL tolerating being tuned 3kHz off. The EU version is 9kHz, but only does 144-146MHz and most FM 2m activity in VK is 146-148MHz.