Thanks.. that was taken about an hour before a HUGE RAINSTORM hit and turned the desert into a vast sea of glue where it's impossible to drive or even walk! Check out this pano I made of the aftermath.
Frankly, it was sucky. Before the masses arrived apparently some GSM & CDMA services were working pretty well from the permanent towers in Gerlach but once there were more then a few hundred phones out there they just shut down.
The OpenBTS system never went online as far as I can tell. Pagalegba open access was supposed to go online too providing internal-playa only text messaging functionalities but that didn't appear to come online either.
The Playa and Black Rock City is a big place though, so it's possible that we just didn't have coverage at our camp, but I didn't hear any rumors of it working for anyone.
Wow! Thats a heckofa pano there, and it looks like soup from here. I love the finger of light streaming down.
Huh. Guess I'll have to wait for their post BM writeup to see what happened. I'm following it closely, because I may end up using some variant of that at my new job. I'm running a network for a remote mine in AK, and we're 40 miles and 2 valleys away from the nearest cell tower. It'd be a huge morale boost if I could get any sort of cell signal in here, save the guys from blowing $200 a hitch on prepaid cards(the joys of AK, the 3 cents a minute prepaid cards you get in the lower 48, are 20 cents or more a min up here). Even if its GSM voice/SMS only, it'd help.
full sized: http://www.flickr.com/photos/veo/4997437042/in/set-72157624847329933/
Frankly, it was sucky. Before the masses arrived apparently some GSM & CDMA services were working pretty well from the permanent towers in Gerlach but once there were more then a few hundred phones out there they just shut down.
The OpenBTS system never went online as far as I can tell. Pagalegba open access was supposed to go online too providing internal-playa only text messaging functionalities but that didn't appear to come online either.
The Playa and Black Rock City is a big place though, so it's possible that we just didn't have coverage at our camp, but I didn't hear any rumors of it working for anyone.
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Huh. Guess I'll have to wait for their post BM writeup to see what happened. I'm following it closely, because I may end up using some variant of that at my new job. I'm running a network for a remote mine in AK, and we're 40 miles and 2 valleys away from the nearest cell tower. It'd be a huge morale boost if I could get any sort of cell signal in here, save the guys from blowing $200 a hitch on prepaid cards(the joys of AK, the 3 cents a minute prepaid cards you get in the lower 48, are 20 cents or more a min up here). Even if its GSM voice/SMS only, it'd help.
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