On Sat, 12 Dec 2020 12:31:21 -0800, 2G wrote:

He was fortunate and got a weak cell phone signal to send
his situation to fellow pilots back at Ely.

Not strictly on the subject of electro-flight but bjut on-topic for
retrieves, so...

Its worth knowing that, if the mobile signal at a landout site is very
poor - drops out or unintelligible voice call, a text message has a
better chance of getting through than a voice call. This is because the
bandwidth needed to send a text is less than for voice and a phone will
keep trying to send a text message until either it gets through id the
battery goes flat.

There is an example of thius working: a while back a car left the road in
a hilly part of NZ. The people in it were trapped in the car and, because
it was in a gully, the signal barely worked: it was too poor for an
understandable voice call, so they tried texting and that did the trick.



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Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org