I think it would absolutely awesome if one could combine the FM receiver with Ovi Maps, so the navigation app could use the traffic information available on FM frequencies when planning routes. As the N900 has both an FM receiver and a GPS, i think this could improve the navigation experience quite much. More info on TMC here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_Message_Channel

Brainstorm link: http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...with_ovi_maps/

don't most navigation apps have real time traffic through the internet?????

This offers the advantage of not needing to be connected to the Internet which if you don't have a data contract could be beneficial. This would however realistically require an app to do the routing on the device rather than using a server for routing.

I'm curious as to whether you would need to plug in your headphones to have a good enough aeriel to receive the information over FM.

You probably would need headphones connected (fm radio sucks without them, even if you force-start the radio, so i'd imagine data mixed in would be that good either)
Also, does ovi maps support this? This is actually the big problem. Since that app is not open, this functionality would need to be implemented by nokia. And they can't even be bothered to get maps 3.0 on the n900 (or, for that matter, make an official fm radio app)

Agreed, but with Ovi Maps on the N900 you need data to get a GPS lock.

bingp.

and i couldn't imagine my device with no data plan. i wouldn't know what to do :S

I would have thought that the battery drain would also be an issue unless you are constantly plugged into a charger too.

Theory sounds fine though I would suspect it might be more likely to feature with a Maemo hosted app than Nokian one.

While running FM Radio you can read the RDS data stream from the sysfs interface of the driver (/sys/bus/i2c/driver/radio_bcm2048/3-022/rds_data or similar, tried to reconstruct the path out of my head). It should be pretty easy to extract TMC there. 3rd party apps can make use of the FM radio driver through the fmrx-enabler D-Bus interface.

Have been thinking about this, too. I will try to extract the TMC databases of event and location codes from my car's navigation DVD.

Our hacking friends on Windows Mobile have done something very similar over the last few months: TMC R&D: Get TMC from the FM radio of your device . This might give us a LOT of information on what to do.

Interesting overview on an engineering company website here in Switzerland.

And some more from SourceForge

Thanks for the contributions everyone. My idea was to simply use the existing capabilities of the device to enhance the navigation. Of course i'm aware of the current status of Ovi Maps for Maemo, however, if they are currently working on improving it (and i want to believe they do), this would be a small task to achieve but would gain a whole new functionality.