I could call the utlity company, but for some reason, they chose voice navigation (instead of keypad tones) for their menu, and it is not good at recognizing distorted voice (over bad 4G or 2G connection).
Most voice menus have hidden, 1-indexed touchtone mappings.
Hitting zero repeatedly at that point is usually the only way through.
(Why would I report an outage when the power wasn’t out? Our lights blipped and my whole-home battery backup system kicked into action and showed a “grid outage” message. I checked it a few minutes later and it still showed the same status, so wanting to be a helpful neighbor, I reported it. I found out later that the battery backup system stays off-grid for five minutes following an outage of any length, even just a blip, I think as a debounce protection. When the utility trucks showed up, I told them what had happened and that their system wouldn’t let me cancel the report, but they were just glad to have a break from running around dealing with outages nearby, so they stayed and talked for a few minutes, curious about the battery system. Nice guys.)
I forgot to save the links to the others.
I've emphasized this, repeatedly, to ~every product owner I've worked with in my 26-year career.
A thing of beauty, compared to their normal home page with 90+ files of 12MB.
Why would you rather build SUVs for soccer moms than race cars?
You use something some 200 to 2000 times more powerful.
is also a nice one
Connectivity was knocked out from Black Mountain all the way to the Tennessee and Georgia borders. I'd be surprised if many people even have shitty 3G back yet. What I know is remaining in touch with people who live there has been hard.
In an emergency you are allowed to transmit without a license. There were plenty of unlicensed calls going to the Mt. Mitchell repeater.
All that being said, I am definitely getting my license once this is over.
You can also talk without a license, who's going to stop you? Especially in an emergency situation.
Would there be any risks associated with increased “free for all” amounts of radio traffic going around during a natural disaster like this? Couldn’t specific channels become cluttered to the point where signal is too disrupted to read, or is that not quite how it works?
aren't wired headphones increasingly unsupported in newer phones?
Some phones even used to have TV tuners in them, though I don't think any of them were sold in the US.
The original model did come with an external anthena, and the latest model is from 2015, no anthena needed
In any case, in places like eg India 4G is more common than 3G. 3G is being phased out. 5G is rolling out.
(I realise that India isn't the poorest of the poor anymore. But not sure that's necessary for your argument?)
all i was able to do was to send and receive signal/telegram/etc. messages...
If I could sum up much of the miserableness of this disaster event it would be communication breakdowns in all kinds of ways.
I get that these counties don’t have the budget or the technical staff for this but it’s really unfortunate.