Posted on 01/07/2023 6:17:28 PM PST by dynachrome
On Wednesday, Salt Lake City public lands officials hiked for hours up a snowy trail to remove a mysterious device – one that’s popping up all over the foothills.
It consists of a locked battery box, a solar panel, and an antenna, according to Tyler Fonarow, the city’s recreational trails manager.
“These towers have been bolted into different peaks and summits and ridges around the foothills,” Fonarow explained, “and it started with one or two, and now it might be as much as a dozen.”
The first ones appeared about a year ago, but Fonarow said many more were found in the past few months. The small towers don’t have permits, and it’s unclear who’s installing them.
(Excerpt) Read more at ksltv.com ...
The truth is out there.
If the speculation is correct, these mysterious antennas could be hotspots connecting to a wireless blockchain-based network for Helium. This entirely new incentive model allows people to set up hotspots that act as Helium miners and serve data to devices. People can earn money by simply buying a hotspot and plugging it in.
"Mining HNT is done by installing a simple device on your home or office window," Helium wrote on their website, adding these "hotspots provide miles of wireless network coverage for millions of devices around you using Helium LongFi, and you are rewarded in HNT for doing this. And because of an innovative proof-of-work model (we call it "Proof-of-Coverage"), your Hotspot only uses 5W of energy."
There's no confirmation Helium hotspots are the devices being found by officials, but speculation indeed points to that.
I wonder how a solar panel could be considered illegally installed.
Oh, wait!
No city permit makes it illegal.
Obviously repeaters.
That's my best guess. We have them here. A bunch of us hams w/GMRS licenses also are doing it out my way. Yes, for off grid comms.
What brought you to that conclusion - the presence of miniature duplexers?
That looked like a GMRS antenna in the video clip. I recognize it as being the same/very similar to one that the guys out my way use.
It's not hard to get a cheap solar panel, a cheap GMRS antenna, a few Baofeng's linked together as a repeater setup and a battery pack all wired together to make a cheap GMRS repeater. I'd bet that's what was in the box.
There are also kits readily available sans solar panel that are about $250 to buy and deploy. For those of us in a ham club it's actually a pretty cheap hobby to fund some cheap linked repeaters together. I help fund six of them on a monthly basis.
They are likely measuring sunlight. They did this on our property recently.
“I want to believe “
That’s not how we do it. Our antennas don’t need solar power. And a repeater would need to be on a substantial base to be effective over more than a short distance.
That's why they're in the hills. Height = Might on UHF/VHF.
If the local government never issued a permit the can find out who put it there. Send out the bomb squad to blow them up and see who shows up to replace it. If no one shows up, at least they got to blow something up.
The repeaters we deploy all have battery backup and solar to keep those batteries charged. Of course our primary source of power is hardlined electrical power.
We've actually had a recent case where one of our repeaters lost power for four days. We had enough battery backup & solar to stay online for three of those four days. (We're in process of adding additional battery to extend uptime in event of a longer outage.)
The antennas are marked “900-930mhz” so it’s the 33cm band.
L
After I wrote that it dawned on me that they are in the damned mountains. In New England getting a signal over a mountain isn’t that much of a struggle.
We have a repeater on “our” mountain that can hit a receiver 40 miles away on 2M. Our mountains would be small hills in Utah.
I stand corrected.
I'm gonna have to go back and look again, I completely missed that. Damn, you're more observant than I am.
No worries, all good!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.