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Smartphone with FM Radio Tells Your Position

posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday May 21 2014, @03:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the Radio-Gaga dept.

kaszz writes:

The reason why FM receivers are present on smartphones is that they can be used to locate your position by noting a simple thing as signal strength of transmitters. More advanced methods makes use of SNR, frequency deviation and multipath interference characteristics. And the same method can be used for WiFi which of course makes collection of such data very useful for localization purposes where GPS etc isn't useful. Arrival time of a radio signal that is reported to the operator from many devices may also be used for the same purpose.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday May 22 2014, @01:07AM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Thursday May 22 2014, @01:07AM (#46204) Homepage Journal

    An FM tuner is in your phone because it is incredibly cheap to bundle it into either the cellular receiver or the wifi chipset.

    Exactly. You're talking about adding a single capacitor to the receiving circuit. You can't get much cheaper than that.

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