This video caught my attention yesterday while browsing YouTube.
DIY cellular base station… that could be very useful for communication.
This is awesome. I’m a big believer in stocking legacy tech because its cheap, readily available and usually can be repurposed for stuff like this. My only concern would be eating up a whole fancy SDR just for some more walkie talkies, but if you could find some dedicated 2G infrastructure radios on ebay or something I bet you could build a pretty cohesive system for a lot cheaper than other options. I personally always keep around a few dial-up modems still because I know that if a disaster ever strikes I can jack in anywhere where i can get a tone and dial up a telephone ISP to hopefully be able to access the internet
Odds of dial-up working when cellular doesn’t are low. After hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, cell service came back in most places before landlines. That dial-tone no longer means connectivity to a telephone switch. Analog calls are digitized and carried on the same high-speed long-haul digital networks as everything else. The only thing in POTS that’s still analog is the “last mile” wiring from the phone jack to the nearest mux.
The best disaster preparedness is to assume a complete loss of internet access. Read some of the stories of people trying to keep data centers running in New Orleans after Katrina and you’ll see why in a large scale disaster, the data centers will be down within days and connectivity won’t matter. Scrap the old modems and get a HAM radio for comms and an “Internet in a Box” (https://internet-in-a-box.org/) - or similar setup - for off-line information/entertainment access.
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