Listen to Phone Radio Without Headphones

Hi all,

Although we live in the internet and social networks era, and I own several smartphones, I still find myself using simple Nokia phones when I go outdoors, just for the simple fact that they hold a charge forever, get good reception and are very rugged and cheap, so there's really not a big problem if you get them wet, drop or loose them.

There is also another feature on most of the low end Nokia phones that I find useful: they have an embedded FM radio. However, in order to use it, people at Microsoft (and to be fair, the people at Nokia before them), decided that you MUST attach headphones to your phone before activating the FM tuner, even if you find yourself in an area with strong FM signals, that allows for excellent reception without an external antenna.

In the following simple steps I will show you how to bypass this constraint so that you can listen to your phone radio without being forced to carry your headphones with you. Of course, in this case, all the listening will be done in the phone's loudspeaker.

Step 1: Needed Parts and How to Use Them

The solution to the above-mentioned problem is very simple. All you need is a 3.5 mm jack connector and an 100 ohms resistor. Other resistor values will most certainly work, probably anything up in the KOhms region, but the 100 ohms value will definitely do the trick.

Just open the 3.5 mm jack connector and solder the resistor between the central connection and ANY of the two lateral connections (if it's a stereo jack), or between the central connection and the lateral connection (if it's a mono jack).

After you connect the resistor as described, all you have to do is connect your "rezistorized" jack to the phone any time you want to listen to the radio without the hassle of connecting headphones to it.

And that's it folks. Just keep the jack in your back pack when you go outdooring with your trusted Nokia brick and happy listening to your favorite radio programs. Of course, you need to be close enough to the radio emitter in order to use this.