Emergency Cellphones That Work Without Phone Towers Or Satellites
Doctor Gardner-Stephen using his reprogrammed cellphone to talk to his team of researchers during testing in the Outback desert and Flinders Mountain ranges of South Australia.
It is stories like this that make me proud to be an Australian. A team of Aussie scientists from Flinders University have found a way to re-program mobile phones (cell phones) so they can talk to each other over short distances without working cellphone tower or a communications satellite. This would make these cellphones ideal for emergency communications in a disaster situation, like the recent major earthquake in Port au Prince, Haiti.
These radio boffins have been testing out their modified mobile phones in remote desert areas of South Australia that are hundreds of miles or kilometers from the nearest cellphone towers. The researchers have even been in deep canyons, and the cellphones are able to talk to each other over a distance of a few hundred yards (meters) or so.
The modified cell phones are models that already have an inbuilt WiFi feature, and the boffins re-programmed the phones to make calls to each other using just the WiFi signals. Normally wifi transmissions are used over very short distances, to link computers and their peripheral devices, such as wireless-enabled printers, optical scanners, hard disk drive remore storage, or from computer to computer. But here the WiFi works from phone to phone, making phone towers (computer controlled radio repeaters) unneccesary.
It was Aussie ingenuity like this that created the original Outback pedal-operated radio transmitter-receiver that remote Outback cattle stations (ranches) could use to call for help from the Royal Flying Doctor Service.
For further details, click on the photo (above). The link will send you to the original article, which is on the Australian ABC News web site.
Categories: Emergency Communications Tags: cellphone, disaster communications, emergency radio, Haiti earthquake, mobile phone, outback radio, safety radio, wifi communications
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