Re:A YouTuber purposely crashed his plane in California, FAA...
by spookthesunset on Thursday April 21, 2022 @11:32AM
(#31110792)
If you get high enough, in many places you’ll eventually hit line of sight to at least some cell tower. I’ve gone deep into wilderness areas and it isn’t uncommon to get cell coverage somewhere on a ridge line or mountain peak. Often strong enough that you can hit Facebook, upload pictures, download offline maps, or even videos.
It’s kind of nuts, really.
Re:A YouTuber purposely crashed his plane in California, FAA...
by abakker on Thursday April 21, 2022 @12:05PM
(#31111290)
Can confirm. In general, Death Valley has no signal. However, when my wife and I biked from saline valley to racetrack valley up the Lippincott road, we kept finding little spots of reasonably strong cell signal - enough that we were able to wait here: 8584JCR4+6C and get enough signal to download a new audiobook.
Our whole time left in DV, we never found any other reliably strong signal.
Re:A YouTuber purposely crashed his plane in California, FAA...
by ghaff on Thursday April 21, 2022 @12:32PM
(#31111625)
As of a few years ago Furnace Creek had cell service (it didn't used to) but Death Valley as a whole doesn't have much coverage. You were presumably seeing a tower somewhere in the mountains west of Death Valley.
Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
Historically, it was pretty situational if you should stay put and make yourself safe and visible to rescuers or if you should try to self-rescue. But my sense is today the general impulse is to call for rescue--with the caveat that many of the places people are most likely to get in trouble are the least likely to have cell phone reception.