Great! I hope you found the CERT training useful and informative.
I think I was directly to the front left of you, possibly in an off-duty goon shirt. I remember you asking if I minded that you were taking a video. I haven’t watched all of your video but I skimmed through and it doesn’t look like you got anyone other than the speaker.
The speaker keeps talking about how you rebuild infrastructure with large boxes of expensive gear and not $70 devices but I wish someone would have pointed out to him that no one believes that we’re going to rebuild infrastructure with $70 Bluetooth devices but also not everyone can drop several grand on gear.
He does make a few valid points that I brought up in posts early on when I was trying to test them in an area without cellphone signal. Dropping GoTennas into an area with no cell signal doesn’t work. But dropping GoTennas with paired cellphones that already have the app and maps already downloaded are a different story. Of course, the cheaper cellphones and tablets don’t have GPS so that doesn’t do all that much good either.
I just wish they had installed ROM space on the goTenna so that you could side-load the software from it once it was paired.
Where GoTennas come into their own are in the pre-planning stages. If all of your team leaders have their GoTennas and know how to use them and charge them then you can track your teams easily. If there are high elevation locations that have self-sustained nodes already in place it gives you relatively inexpensive infrastructure to boost your responders capabilities.
What I need right now are those nodes. I need something sealed and easy to drop on the roof of someone’s home that I don’t have to ever worry about and I’ll have my node network in place. But now we get into what I didn’t want to deal with and that’s putting in a significant amount of time and effort and money into hacking a solution together. And at that point the ham argument that amateur radio already has this solution becomes valid.