Alternate communications methods

[floridacyclist]

We had an interesting learning experience that I thought was worth sharing. My 15yo son, who is also a ham was out with a ground team this past weekend on a "nature walk" looking for natural hazards. They had already toured some large piles of dirt and found several gopher holes, but couldn't find any poisonous plants, so he took his laptop out of it's backpack to show them some color photos instead of the line drawings in our books. He tried to connect to the internet through his cellphone, but could not receive a strong enough signal. He then threw a canteen full of water over a tree limb with a string tied to it and commenced pulling his phone about 30ft up into the tree where it had plenty of signal. Using Bluetooth, he connected to the internet (at broadband speed) and found the pictures he was looking for...all while standing in the middle of the woods. In the debrief we realized that this could have also been used to send email, text messages (either via email or if no computer is available, set it up, hit send, then if the phone says "no service, re-try when services is available?" hit yes and pull it up as high as you can) or possibly help someone locate your position if you are lost. Just be sure to tie it on flag-style as most phones are too light to come back down on their own, so it is handy to be able to pull it back down as well.

How do you communicate when there is no high-bird, cell service, or CAP radio station near enough to hear you?

[Eclipse]

How do you communicate when there is no high-bird, cell service, or CAP radio station near enough to hear you?

You don't.

Most mission safety briefings include hard-fast rules that if you lose communications for whatever reason, your #1 job is to re-establish communications, up-to-and-including back-tracking to the last established communications point, and/or returning to base.

[Al Sayre]

Smoke Signals, Semiphore Flags, Light signals to passing aircraft, Drive to the nearest sign of habitation and call in on the phone...

[♠SARKID♠]

Stomp on the ground really hard, yell, astrally project yourself back to mission base, or just switch to HF 

Frankly when you rule out highbird, cell, and CAPRadio there isnt much left to communicate with short of visual signals and walking up to somebody's house and politely asking to use the phone.  Even your son's internet improv is rendered moot by no cell service.

[floridacyclist]

Of course most GTs on't have HF; we only do because I have my SGC2000 in my truck and an Icom 703 in a backpack.

granted, the internet improv isn't going to work in an area of just flat NO cell service, but here in FL, it is usually a problem of weak to no signal in small areas.....which was overcome by getting the receiving antenna up high enough. Will it work all the time? Of course not.....but it might, like it did then.

I also have an email from NHQ stating that we can attach externa antennas to our HTs for temporary portable use provided that we don't try to run a mission or use one of these setups as a permanent base station.