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Comment by vmchale | Hacker News Reader

what?

Seconded. Just watch any movie of a World War/Doomsday/Zombie Apocalypse level event occurs. The people get information via radio. They don't plug into the internet. The internet may no longer be there. This might be hard to imagine for the younger generations, as they've not known to not have the internet. Radios are very effective for broadcasting "pirate" signals, and are pretty easy to receive as well. It would not be that hard to MacGyvre a crystal radio together. It used to be everybody's first "learn electronics" project. You can even do it from non-digital equipment. Analog signals are "cool" in their low-tech abilities. Here's an example video of how low-tech you can go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqdcU9ULAlA

Digital is robust too - you can run mesh networks of phones and wifi equipment.

Hams have a rep for mostly holding on to ancient technology, but they have demonstrated wideband microwave mesh networking with off the shelf hardware and lower bandwidth HF networking. Those goodies are more effective than the CW and SSB depictions in movies.

Digital requires being able to decode the transmission once received. That takes a bit of work on the receiving side that an analog signal would not. Digital has a lot of advantages, but in my opinion the single greatest advantage to analog is its simplicity. Just like an analog vinyl record. Put a pencil in the center hole to spin it, a sewing needle taped perpendicular to a piece of paper rolled into a cone and you have a decoder/player. This is the reason the Library of Congress archives audio to vinyl over any other format.

There are times when "best" isn't the best option.

While at it - make the mesh a blockchain one...

> they have demonstrated wideband microwave mesh networking with off the shelf hardware.

That's academic if you don't happen to be close to a suitably stocked shelf in an emergency situation. As has been pointed out in other posts, simple analog gear can be improvised using basic and easily obtained components.

The current fashion for getting rid of low-tech backups for important infrastructure reminds me of the Titanic: the ship is "unsinkable" so why not get rid of most of the lifeboats?

Somehow, I expect a crystal radio will survive an EMP that fries every P-N junction in a digital device... That's robust. Crystal radios don't even need batteries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio

> Just watch any movie of a World War/Doomsday/Zombie Apocalypse level event occurs. The people get information via radio.

You know these are fictional, right? They're made up. You can't observe a work of fiction and judge from that what people will do in a given situation.

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