Receive particular Radio Frequency by Android phone?

Question

I would like to know if there is any way to receive Radio waves of particular frequency through an Android phone?

If it is not possible, I would like to know the best way I can locate/communicate with a device(IC chip) within round 200 meters of the Android phone (eg. through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi)

Thanks for your patience.

Answer 1

To receive radio waves of a freq, you would need specialized hardware. You can think of bluetooth and wifi chipsets in your phone as a kind of specialized hardware that is tuned to receive the respective frequencies of BT and wifi. Basically, RF waves are electromagnetic waves with some frequency. So, any antenna would be able to catch them. But since there will be a large number of waves which will be transmitting data at different frequencies, a hardware unit takes input from the antenna and filters out the unwanted frequencies(there are many problems to process the input directly at software level, google it). To locate a device you could use the signal strength of bluetooth or wifi which is provided directly by the OS to the app level (like RSSI).