Interesting. Is there anything someone could bring or use to stop this signal?
Satellite phones would be able to defeat it. Cellphones are going to be vulnerable no matter what, unless you had your own network.
That sounds ridiculous, but all it would take is a ‘hard’ link to a single tower, and then the tower (connected to a more robust source of power) would deal with the phase and signal shifting.
VOIP would work to, but you’d have to make sure you’re ‘hard’ linked to an endpoint that would give you an IP.
When I say ‘hard’, I mean fixed, and something stable.
Take a phone into the forest on a backpacking trip without putting the phone in airplane mode. You’ll find the same thing occurs.
The reason for the shifting is that JAMMING would have been obvious. Jamming does the same thing. The phone keeps probing for a signal, finds nothing, probes again, duty cycle spikes to 80% or more.
Nobody would have had a signal.
Cold weather definitely saps a signal, but it didn’t look THAT cold out.