On 12/12/2020 5:09 PM, Martin Gregorie wrote:
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.

Yup. Also, people who are stuck without the ability to recharge their
phone, whether following a hurricane or a landout, with the prospect of
a long wait, should know that the way to get the most communications out
the battery is to turn the phone completely off, and periodically (say
every 30 minuets) turn it on, check for (or send) text messages, then
turn it completely off again. Besides stretching the battery, since
those texts don't need much bandwidth, they are more likely to get
through post-disaster when the still-working cell towers are overwhelmed
with demand. Too bad that text messages, unlike emails, don't have date
and time stamps, so AFAIK you can't tell when they were sent. When you
turn the phone on (or get it out of "airplane mode", or finally get a
signal) the text comes in and gets stamped with the time it arrived -
semi-useless info.