SLC's recreational trails manager says it might be related to cryptocurrency. This sounds like the Helium crypto network, which is an IoT network offering node owners payment in cryptocurrency, which has plummeted in value ($55.22 in Nov 2021, $1.73 today).
I disagree, this sounds _exactly_ like what the drug cartels have been doing in Mexico for years. They build their own network so they can bypass the government. It makes more sense that they are connecting their operations further up north given the amount of security upgrades that the USA has been doing recently.
One Example: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-telecoms-cartels-s...
"Crypto" is just a buzzword that people who don't understand tech jump to as a kneejerk reaction.
There would be no reason for cartels to establish parallel cellular networks in Salt Lake City of all places.. and these devices don't sound remotely like what the cartels were doing - you need backhaul to have a cell site - these are remote mesh wifi devices. All of the cartel ones are 'parasitic' where they use the actual cell site's hardware to provide a standalone antenna.
The Mexican cartels use actual cell/mobile equipment, and have kidnapped engineers from South Texas to gain additional technical knowledge. Also, these areas surround SLC are not territory they're trying to control in the same way. What utility would there be in this network vs simply using encrypted communication over the internet?
On the other hand, solar powered mining with just good enough radios to do C2 and send back any hashes found would be an exact match to this scale of equipment.
But why not just install solar panels on your house? Or legally, in some remote property? On top of the mountain is probably one of the most expensive places to deploy infrastructure. The elevation is almost certainly to provide radio reception coverage.
There's networks like Helium that are based around LoraWAN mesh IoT miners. Assuming there's some financial advantage to having maximal connectivity to other miners, putting a few on the mountains above a major metro area seems like a very straightforward idea.
I’ve heard major metro area as roughly being top 100 cities in the world which Salt Lake City is nowhere close to.
If anything Salt Lake seems about average size for a city, it’s just located in the middle of nowhere which makes it seem more important. This is also why they need this kind of backup communication system so close to the city.
Yeah, let's just derail into a subthread bickering about what threshold counts as a major metro area, vs meaningfully engaging with the actual topic at hand.
This place is cursed with the worst pointless nerd sniping behavior.
Complaining because people are pointing out you’re wrong is a complete waste of everyone’s time.
Talking about metro size is actually relevant because if it was a major metro area like say LA they could actually use the cellphone network that would blanket the area. Instead it’s a modest city in basically the middle of nowhere thus the problem.
This conversation is indeed a distraction, but for posterity and those curious the population for the SLC area is slightly confusing because of the population proportion of the central city itself with the legal name "Salt Lake City" is small relative to all the adjoining municipalities that basically blend together into one city (even including street addresses, grid system, public transit), and the way the metro areas for Provo, SLC, and Ogden are reported in the census separately even though people commute between them in the same way people travel between SF and San Jose.
The numbers are more like:
1) Salt Lake City: 200K people
2) Salt Lake City Metro Area (MSA): 1.25-1.3 million
3) Salt Lake-Ogden-Provo Combined Statistical Area (CSA): ~2.7 Million. FYI this region is also called the "Wasatch Front"
To understand these levels of breakdown the equivalent for Bay Area naming would be:
1) San Francisco itself (the 49 square miles): ~800K people
2) San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley MSA: ~4.6 million
3) San Jose-SF-Oakland CSA (think the whole "Bay Area"): ~9.5 Million
It's the Combined Statistical Area of SLC (the "Wasatch Front") which is now ~22nd-24th in the nation, not the MSA itself.
It's similar in size to Charlotte or Sacramento, and larger than the respective CSAs of eg Pittsburgh, San Antonio, Kansas City, Nashville, or Las Vegas
That’s true enough, but missing the major difference. Salt Lake City’s metropolitan area is effectively in the middle of nowhere surrounded by desert not rings of exurbs that blend into new cities the way you normally see around major cities.
Which is why it isn’t surrounded by a great cellphone network, and thus why they are setting up a independent radio network.
The I-80 and I-15 both intersect in SLC and are major routes. Cell coverage is just fine until it gets a little sketchy up by Idaho but still (close enough to) 100%.
Good enough where you wouldn’t need to set up your own system. Or be stupid enough to make them noticeable and have the Forest Service confiscate them. I mean, come on, a little black paint and a cryptic “Property of US Government” sticker would go a long way.
Or, if you want to be super sneaky just throw them up on a telephone pole because it’s well known that the companies only mess with their own equipment so you can hide stuff in plain sight.
That’s not really useful if you want to make use of the other 90+% of land in the area such as by having people fly over it in paragliders and possibly make an emergency landings.
That was one idea tossed out, but there isn’t a cellphone network coverage in most areas covered by this network.
Suggesting it’s useful in places that overlapped ignores the utility in areas where it would be the only option. I doubt drug dealers are meeting up in the desert outside of cellphone range with their suppliers, but it isn’t a crazy idea.
Why on earth would cartels kidnap engineers when they could just pay them? This seems like the kind of specialized knowledge you cannot meaningfully get out of someone with a $5 wrench, just how they hire lawyers and other professionals to work with existing modern infrastructure that you cannot just avoid.
You vastly underestimate how intense the cartels are.
They want total control, not bribes.
One of the more medium size cartels, Jalisco New Generation, specializes in training assassins against their will. Let that just sink in. They do this by advertising jobs, kidnapping the people who show up to interview, and then torturing them in horrific ways until they get the total compliance of learned helplessness. Then they send them on suicide missions.
I don't want to go into the details of the torture because its bad stuff, involving cannibalism even. If you are morbidly curious there's a couple interviews with survivors you can find somewhere on youtube.
And this is far from the only instance of this sort of thing. Sinaloa has been known to kidnap entire buses and make folks fight to the death, winner gets the dubious honor of becoming a member.
These are people who assume every single person in their world is plotting to overthrow them in an instant, and leave nothing to chance vs that. They don't want to hope their bribe is enough to keep you loyal, they want to know you're loyal because you've seen them torture to death countless people. You don't get any agency in the matter.
There's a number of brave journalists that cover this stuff locally, but a lot of what I'm talking about has been covered in national media in the US, it just doesn't get much traction.
I have friends that live in Mexico so we talk about it fairly often as well. One of my friends in particular is a wireless business owner with customers near Brownsville/Matamoros, where those telcom engineer kidnappings happened, so he's acutely aware of things.
Can you try to put more effort into participating here? This is actually a material conversation to me so I don't in the slightest appreciate some rando on the internet is trying to say I'm risking my friends life with sharing very innocuous general information as a zero effort rhetorical dunk.
Adding to this, they are growing fast [1] and rumor has it they are moving into Texas. Curious what the U.S. will do to try to stop them. Military perhaps?
I mean what they are setting up is entirely legal systems it may not be legal to set them up in certain places but nothing illegal. They don't have to kidnap anyone to achieve this goal unless they are too poor to pay someone to help them. However drugs that is bad, mmm kay?
>One of the more medium size cartels, Jalisco New Generation, specializes in training assassins against their will. Let that just sink in. They do this by advertising jobs, kidnapping the people who show up to interview, and then torturing them in horrific ways until they get the total compliance of learned helplessness. Then they send them on suicide missions.
This is far from the only source you can find that supports what I'm saying. Search for CJNG to find more about them. They're sort of the Phoenix that rose from the infamous Los Zetas.
> Why on earth would cartels kidnap engineers when they could just pay them?
Why would an engineer willfully take a cartel job, when there is a high risk of them killing you instead of paying you, and killing you by cutting off your face just because they were bored and disturbed? If a cartel even offered me a job, I'd fear for my life.
I have no interest of watching it myself, but there's an infamous video that's been talked about so much I'm reasonably confident it is more or less as described, and yes, it involves skinning someone's face off while they're alive, and using amphetamine injection to ensure they don't pass out.
These people really are as bad as it gets. You don't want to be anywhere close to involved with them.
The drug angle doesn't make much sense in Utah. This State trends towards prescription drug abuse [0] [1], and aggressively prosecutes drug offenses to the max. How could antennas be relevant?
Weren't they at least installing their stuff on existing towers etc to make it less obvious? Planting big solar panels into the landscape must be the stupidest attempt at creating a secret cell network...
What you say sounds possible and plausible, although I would not immediately discount crypto, as the Helium map does show some cells in unpopulated areas in the hills surrounding the SLC metro.
They should be able to eliminate Helium as the culprit if they're able to inspect what's in the box, as Helium needs a Helium-sanctioned box, from my understanding.
What does this provide that an encrypted cellphone messenger app does not? I'm sure they have the know how to acquire SIMs through intermediaries to remain anonymous. That's probably a lot less suspicious than setting up random radio towers, in fact this story is evidence of that.
Presumably self-operated infrastructure could expand comms to remote areas that don't normally have cell service. They makes sense in stretches of the southern border. But right outside salt lake city is covered by cell access.
Cell phones are basically locator beacons for the police. The cartels know this.
It's not worth discussing the specifics in the open, but the investigative techniques have gotten good enough that even "anonymous" SIM cards don't buy you anything.
A radio is inherently a locator beacon. Radio direction finding has been a cornerstone of signals intelligence for over a century. A cell phone sending encrypted messages over Signal or WhatsApp is way less suspicious than a radio mysteriously appearing on a hill. Just get a patsy to buy a normal sim card - not an "anonymous sim card" - I'm sure cartels are easily able to do this.
Sure but one is inherently more difficult (radio direction finding) than the other (having your phone constantly beacon to a dense network of towers).
What I was alluding to is when you have full access to the cellular network, there are other indicators that can be used to task tracking other than just the SIM card. You don't need to know that phone X is person Y, you just need to know that phone X fits the criteria of how a drug mule operates.
> you just need to know that phone X fits the criteria of how a drug mule operates.
And my point is that this is way, way harder than looking out the window and noticing a radio tower perched on a hilltop that wasn't there before. It's far more clandestine to obtain security through obscurity even if it means operating in a network controlled by the authorities. Encrypted traffic looks like any other encrypted traffic. There's little to make a drug dealer stand out from other cell phone traffic, unless they're communicating over cleartext.
That is the point I am trying to get to without giving away specifics. The reason you see homegrown communications networks in Mexico is because it is trivial for the DEA to identify members of smuggling operations by way of cell phone TTPs. DEA obtains both explicit and unauthorized access to cellular networks in foreign countries. At that point it is a pretty trivial pattern matching problem which allows you to identify persons of interest and track them going forward.
They do use large scale "direction finding" to identify radios used by smuggling operations, but that is primarily targeted at boats with higher power transmitters.
As I stated earlier, it does make sense to deploy shadow comms infrastructure along the southern border (and northern border of Mexico). Detecting a bunch of cell phone traffic in a completely remote area nowhere near any official border crossings is indeed hugely suspicious. And the cartels do set up their own infrastructure there.
What doesn't make sense is deploying infra in the vicinity of major cities. There's plenty of benign cell phone traffic there, and this kind of pattern matching is not viable.
If they keep popping up after these initial ones are taken down, I guess that's leads towards the idea of whoever is doing it has a big incentive to do it.
Would think that crypto would have too long a payback esp if the equipment keeps disappearing.
These units are far too small and low-powered to be cartel cell towers. The towers they're building in Mexico are more or less normal towers, supplemented by COW trailers (larger units with generator+solar).
Cartels in CONUS are typically using regular cell and satellite phones. Ostensibly, the NSA and the various military "Activities" aren't paying attention to CONUS communications, unless it's near the border.
There isn't enough information in the article to reasonably tell what they're designed for. If someone wants to post actual photos of the hardware, that would be swell.
I would think that if it was organized crime, the feds would be all over it already. Even stuff like pirate radio gets tracked and shutdown fairly quickly. I'd imagine the FBI still has significant sigint ops, even if they might be less extensive than during the cold war.
Yes, but if they were taking that action, they would have instructed the public land officials on a cover story, not allowing them to create a mystery out of and open those boxes.
Imagining movie style capers like this is emotionally engaging but pretty distant from the reality of these situations. Assuming you can put lightning into a bottle is extremely dangerous. Most police work involves a lot of methodical boring stuff, not a brilliant technical deception.
So the "hack into them" part isn't quite right. But they certainly do intercept and analyze various signals. Which is generally the boring and tedious part. But right or wrong, it is sort of the standard play for the feds to let some criminal activity continue to gather additonal intel.
Which drug cartels are operating out of public lands in Utah? How did they get there? How has nobody noticed them? Why do drug cartels have interest in the snowy peaks of the SLC foothills of all places? Why are they just in the foothills and not checks notes all the way through Arizona to Mexico?
I may be stereotyping, but in my experience there is a strong ham community within the LDS Church. My first reaction was to assume something ham related, not drug cartel.
Profiling isn't stereotyping, but cancel culture seems to think it is. I'm not LDS but I didn't think it offensive. I am an amateur radio operator however, and I think it likely if for no other reason than the fact that there's a disproportionally large crossover in demographics between the two groups. In fact, as a young adult I worked at a commercial and ham radio shop that was owned by LDS folks.
Ham radio doesn't need to litter the area with these little setups. The Wasatch front already has a bunch of strong mountain top repeaters, some can even be tied together. Check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermountain_Intertie
IME/O, hams and LDS alike tend to go above board when setting up infrastructure like this, and I feel they'd be quite public about their existence.
Some ham radio repeaters atop high-rise buildings I know of are kind of sketchy (such as when someone in the local radio club makes friendly with building engineers/management so they don't have to pay commercial leasing fees or go through HOA baloney, and will sometimes keep the location a secret to avoid attention), but the vast majority are listed on publicly available databases like RepeaterBook, ARTSCIPUB, RFinder, ARRL Repeater Directory, and/or each state's repeater coordination directory, or the AREDN mesh directory, or other ham radio WAN sites.
Since SLC is still totally clueless as to who put these up, it rules out LDS Hams for me.
I don’t understand why the cartel would put these in such an obvious location. (But I also don’t understand why anyone would…)
They seem to be in obvious, high traffic areas. The one mentioned in the video is a short hike from the Utah capitol building. If you hike at all and live in salt lake, this is where you go. Especially in the winter. It seems like they were asking to be found.
It’s certainly less in the winter, but in the summer hundreds of people would hike or bike past this everyday.
What beheadings have happen in Salt Lake City recently? All I can find is an incident that happened in Arches National Park but that one was an accident with a gate not an assault by someone involved in gang activity.
You cannot power more than a femtocell with a solar panel, and these are too far out in wilderness with no wired backhaul to be a plausible mobile mobile network. In parts of Mexico you can take over a house and a power source to put up a real cell site.
I believe Helium does require internet access rather than just working as an offline relay. How's the 4G in those locations? The video shows only one antenna too.
Anecdotally, rooftop telecom site operators, tower owners and WISPs have been approached by "helium" miner people for several years now, they're almost universally laughed at as a non plausible business plan and revenue source.
Somewhere in there is a gem of a good idea. Incentivize operators of a mesh network where you can buy credits to get data on the mesh. Like I can see the concept and in it's raw form it's exciting.
Helium though got way overpriced and insane with the crypto bubble.
Maybe they can rectify it and turn sane? I'd love a world where all this deployed helium hardware isn't trash.
LoRA as a method to implement serial bridges over very narrow channels and low RSL/CINR rates in radio is fine. LoRAWAN and similar are fine. Lots of possible applications. The crypto part is what's truly bizarre.
I don't know how anyone who has spent any time researching bulk-data-service plans for embedded multi-band cat1 LTE radios (a few bucks a month from Verizon or Tmobile per radio) would think that a less reliable, vastly less-covered-area "helium" thing would be something you could rely on for actual traffic to/from your equipment.
They looked at The Things Network and figured that they could do better by paying node operators in their own funbux as an incentive to host nodes.
It worked, just that the customers did not materialize.
I have the same question. Seems like the crash hit them hard and last I heard they were rebasing (n.b., not using this in a technical meaning) on top of Solana.
I also heard a lot of rumors it was a pump/dump or pyramid type scheme, but I haven’t seen proof of that, only if premining (which is awfully scammy to be fair).
There apparently never really ware that many paying customers using Helium's network, so the payouts ware comming from people paying the data credit fees to have their miner listed and accepted to the network.
The moment the network stops expanding, the demand for HNT to pay for datacredits will be gone.
Also, Helium payouts seem to be based on amount of clients in a zone, which would make this pretty pointless.
Helium hype really makes it difficult for other real IoT networks to operate also, like The Things Network, the operators of which do it for free (including myself). Why does everything have to be a moneymaker?
Translation: "Why does everything need to be sustainable? Can't we just keep grifting off of people providing a service for free?"
I always see comments here about open source projects needing better funding mechanisms. Crypto solves this but everyone scoffs at it because crypto has become some boogey man word that gets shunned mostly because of Bitcoin being first with no utility and wasteful energy and ignores any progress made in the space.
The problem is that it’s actually less motivating to get paid a small amount than it is to get paid nothing. So it probably feels bad to put up a node that’s rarely used even though, when it does get used, it’s especially appreciated.
(Bad ideas in this space: GRCoin which pays you for folding@home but can never actually pay the power costs, Payver which supposedly paid for capturing road images while driving but ended up giving like $2/year.)
Those are issues with poor tokenomics and lack of traction. Some businesses fail, but that doesn't mean all do, or that it's impossible to create a good business.
The PV setup is too small/weak to support an very cheap and basic off grid WISP setup, even a very basic one, one small panel of that size won't handle the mid winter cumulative kWh in one month from even two small PTP 5 GHz band 5W load radios and one 5W Mikrotik router (15W 24x7 for a month).
Whatever it is has to be very low power or spend a lot of time in sleep mode.
I was just mulling over the other day that this sort of thing at smaller scale would be a neat idea for guerilla file sharing to work around copyright infringement bots on torrent networks.
Hope on a wifi access point downtown, pull some movies down while you're waiting for your train.
Watch the video and do an image search on "helium crypto solar power". You will see many devices that look like that. Crypto is a plausible explanation.
.. this makes sense - except that project is well-known to the BLM and other folks. My brother is a ARC-GIS engineer for the BLM division and he confirmed the equipment in POWDER is registered with them, the state and the FTC.
this project has DOD involvement, it may be the case that someone is shy about it, because government project, or oops, i didnt realize anyone would care.
I’m a PhD student at the University of Utah, and I actually worked with the Flux Research Group last semester, who operate POWDER, and this isn’t them.
so there isnt any chance, someone was a little presumptuous with placement of equipment, or is the expectation of vetted experimental procedure made certain?
you are in prime location to observe new additions to the signal spectrum, as well as jondav being in a position to physically observe equipment being placed.
have you noticed any RF activity that may be attributed to these devices?
as for baseless conspiracy, thats not happening in this comment.
i would also suggest you get a handle on what the intention of this [rogue] hardware is,and what sort of interaction it may be having with your equipment.
Hey Aston, good to see you on here. I agree this is not how Flux/POWDER operates, I do not see Alex going up the hill and placing equipment without approval...
His setup looks remarkably similar to what the rangers took down and he's got several videos placing Helium miners or whatever they use on remote peaks in Utah.
I suspect the "authorities say it may be related to Crypto" line was just an expert couching their highly confident assessment as a CYA, but it seems to be obviously crypto.
The actual application appears to be tracking paragliders. Helium just provides the internet hotspot:
> Over the course of a week, supported by Tommy and Ryan at Lonestar Tracking, Matthew at Digital Matter, Travis at Helium, and Jeremy C (@jerm on Discord), I deployed 2 off-grid Helium Hotspots high in the mountains of Utah (one at over 8,000' and one above 11,000') to track 30+ paragliders as they flew during the annual Red Rocks Fly In as well as raced during the inaugural X Red Rocks Hike & Fly race.
This explains why somebody would want a hotspot in such a remote, high location.
> The task is to reach the control and turn-points defined by the Race Committee every day for three days as quickly as possible traveling only by paraglider or on foot.
I imagine you'd want good tracking data to get an idea of where you're going.
That seems plausible for that one specific setup - but it's obvious that all of these weird crypto grifters were trying to make money by deploying in remote spots with long range connections to capture the rewards.. there aren't very many paraglider canyons and there are far more of these in the foothills.
No -- in the news report the antennas were different, the solar panel was much larger, the unit was much more permanently attached to the mountain, and there were guylines supporting the unit from severe weather.
Very strange this would be reported without some very basic/obvious information. Like the data/frequencies transmitted in/out of the boxes. That should narrow down potential suspects substantially.
It's common in investigations that authorities don't release everything right away. It gives them in an advantage in certain ways - playing your hand face-down, if you will.
.. from a fellow DarkNetizen: ".. we all concur it's either one of the 2 major w coast drug cartels since SLC is smack in the middle of a 'major flight trade route' tho SLC is not a major market in and of itself. A crypto repeater network makes sense, but why SLC? The other assertion is a DOD project since BLM and other vast expanses of open lands are popular test grounds for new comm tech. I believe it's the latter."
I'm guessing if it were DOD or someone else official, they'd have a cover for just such an occasion. They'd place those things in conjunction with, for example, a local university's earth sciences department, and say they're weather stations.
Wow, whether or not this is helium... I just learned about this thing and I'm like "okay, so you have LoRaWAN and blockchains and yes I can see how you could combine these together but what's the effin point?
Don't get me wrong, I get that some people want to do stuff just for the fun of it and IMHO that's humanity at its best. But this just looks like "new tech -> magic happens -> profit" 0_o
It’s really about the “crypto hype” and that’s really the only incentive behind most of these helium hot spots…
They are expensive and the return is slow. Really nice idea in the grand scheme of things but it’s not DIY friendly network…well it is but if you want to send data via the helium network you MUST pay per message using the helium currency; that and a lot of these hotspots piggy back of internet…sadly not completely decentralized.
You're not wrong in being puzzled by why people would try to glue LoraWAN stuff to "blockchain" BS, that's been pretty much the reaction of everyone who works professionally in wireless telecom industry/applications.
Helium is (was) yet another pump and dump cryptocoin hype train.
I think it was mostly a strategy of combining IoT hype with Blockchain hype, details be damned. Helium isn't nearly as crazy as IOTA, which was blathering on about a starlink style network powered by trinary circuitry (no, I'm not kidding).
I'm very much a cryptocurrency-sceptic, but the basic idea seemed interesting.
There's a whole lot of companies that do want to deploy various sensor things - fixed and mobile. They're using cellular networks at the moment, which comes with costs/capacity/coverage issues.
LoRAWAN would seem to solve some of these - it's unlicensed spectrum, it's low rate, but high enough for basic signalling, and the coverage vs installation cost/complexity thing is amazing.
If you could convince enough people & businesses to drop mesh-nodes on their window sills, ideally with access to their wifi, it could be a relatively cheap way of bootstrapping a large mesh network.
The crypto-mining thing... well I guess that's one way to pay people without involving actual direct cash payments. But like so much in the cryptocurrency space, the actual ROI was far over-sold.
That's embarrassing. I was sure septic was spelt "sceptic". And my PC didn't correct me on it either, so that reinforced the misconception. My apologies.
I think it makes a lot of sense. A huge difficulty in deploying new wireless networking tech is getting enough coverage out of the gate to make it worth people creating hardware for. To try to build a network from grassroots rather than raising an enormous amount of capital first, you need incentives, and having a token based system where the money that people pay to use it rewards the people who are providing the coverage makes perfect sense.
If this specific implementation of it actually doesn't make sense, I think it's a shame, because I would like to live in a world where small groups of techies could put together a protocol and get something like a big distributed mesh network deployed and useful across the world, and blockchain tech seems like a very natural fit for creating a system like that.
Coordination problems and network effects are where we have our most difficult interaction between technology and society, and our standard tools for addressing them (government and corporations mainly) feel like a small part of the solution space.
From another thread, the actual application appears to be something called a "hike and fly race":
> The Global Rescue XRedRocks is a premiere hike and fly race in North America, organized in a similar way to the Eigertour, Vercofly and DolomitiSuperfly- multi-day hike and fly events that take participants into magnificent mountains to see what they’re made of when we pair back free-flight to it’s most raw and exciting form. Travel is only allowed by wing or on foot. There are no supporters. ...
Bandwidth is a finite resource. An installation that is open for everyone to use still harms other people who would like to use that bandwidth for other purposes.
This assumes that whoever set these up made sure there is no interference and hikes up there to remove the device when it breaks instead of just leaving it up there to rot.
It would seem that hogging up spectrum so you can surf the internet is probably a selfish usage? I mean most ham operators don't go 24/7 while talking and using channels.
It disappoints me that americans are seemingly so ambivalent to this particular government overreach. The same thing appears to be playing out with drones now as well.
You can easily do it legally easily, ham test is slightly harder than a written driving test. Basically just learning what emergency bands not to stomp on.
I think ham radio is super neat and good enforcement of the rules makes the space better overall. I've also got lots of friends who are passionate and dedicated hams who've shown me the thrill of chatting with someone continents away over the open airwaves.
... but I get huge hall monitor vibes from a disproportionate percentage of folks in that crowd. For some it seems like it's not about using rules to protect the airwaves– the rules become an end themselves.
Looks like they don't care that much. If they did they probably would have put contact info on it.
Also, theft of one of these things is probably a criminal charge regardless of what rule someone was breaking with it. I'm a licensed motorcycle operator. If I see someone irresponsibly biking in a national park, I can't just take it when they're not looking.
There are some Helium nodes along the SLC foothills [1], though I'm not seeing many so remote or far from a road. Unclear if this displays history or only active nodes.
I was confused until I realised they meant "pare back". I thought they were trying to pair "back free-flight" to "it's most raw and exciting form", until I reparsed.
I was at that race. It's hours away, in a different part of Utah, for 3 days in the fall. The trackers they used for the competition were rented from a completely separate company, and, I believe, use cell based technology. The link you posted is about one guy who used a novel technology in an unofficial capacity. The race organizer wasn't using it at all. I know the organizer.
They have nothing to do with this.
Paragliders already have a solution for tracking outside of competitions, and most carry it in the form of an inReach or Spot device. Ground station based location reporting is not reliable because we can travel 100s of kms in a day over wilderness. In fact, you were required to have satellite tracking as part of the competition, or to participate in the other flying events in Central Utah that week. The cell based trackers provide uniform location tracking for race scoring as a primary purpose, and real time updates as a secondary purpose when cell connections exist. The satellite trackers give you the '911' button.
As far as I can tell your link from these devices placed in Salt Lake to the XRedRocks race is that someone at the race played with similar technology on top of a mountain?
This is one thing I love about HN - hearing from people who are directly involved or familiar with something. Nothing burns brain cycles like an unsolved mystery!
It was a very well built setup that I assumed (as did everyone) that it was put there by the gov in some capacity, such as for weather observations. It wasn't hidden or hard to find by any means and on a fairly popular trail. I would bet during nice summer weather a few hundred people per week walked past it.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was somehow related to Aereo [1][2]. My understanding is they were mostly working out of Utah.
Edit: For those unfamiliar, they set up an operation to re-broadcast (free) OTA TV broadcasts out-of-territory over the internet for a subscription fee. They got shut down after a supreme court decision.
Right, right, people are not supposed to build a dam or a T-shirt factory wherever they please but a small device left in the middle of nowhere difficult to find and comprehend, out of the way and sight literally for everyone, well, next time I will think twice if I make a small rock formation or a tent made of branches against rain in a nice hidden spot without proper signed permission from the authorities, erected on public land.
The shelter erected may sound fair enough only before knowing that it has no permission! Must not be acceptable without the proper paperwork for a sensible person.
Please keep making little rock formations unless it’s explicitly verboten. I love seeing them, they’re delightful little surprises even on the roadside on interstate road trips. Please also continue to shelter yourself as needed, again unless your presence is explicitly verboten, or if you just need to survive. Those are excellent examples of good use of public land, and mostly explicitly verboten is key. Otherwise the land is for your use the same as it is for anyone else.
If they actually cared about their use of public land or what they were doing, then the _very least_ they could have done is put their name and phone number on it.
They didn't.
So, yes, it absolutely gets destroyed. If you fail to take responsibility for your actions, you can generally expect this to be the outcome.
Oi, we talk about some miniscule thing out of the way of anyone and anything in the middle of deserted nowhere left alone to be destroyed by the elements eventually. What 'thing' (harm, gain, obstruction, damage, whatever) one should take resposibility for for god's sake? Not anyone knows that! But must be prety bad and taken down, no, not enoug, destroyed!, by expedition with areal photography because we have absolutely no clue! But at least because no paper trail is there, scandalous, very scandalous, outrage, very bad! Leaving small things out alone in the middle of nowhere not in the way of or observable effect on the public without paperwork, must be destroyed promptly! No questions asked, send the troops! : )
> one should take resposibility for for god's sake? Not anyone knows that!
For one, it will not be "destroyed by the elements." It will "pollute the environment." It also has batteries in it. You are intentionally being obtuse to defend this point. These aren't 10,000 year old cave paintings, this is a modern piece of equipment, possibly being put to use to profit someone at the expense of everyone.
> But at least because no paper trail is there, scandalous, very scandalous, outrage, very bad!
There's only one point of view expressing "outrage" here. Do you share this same resentment for the people that voluntarily clean the sides of highways?
I betcha it's https://gristleking.com, he's been advocating for paragliders to use LoRaWAN for a tertiary emergency communications network (primary being Garmin's Iridium network, then cell or perhaps iOS 14's GPS SOS).
The idea is to have multiple means of calling for help + tracking location when free-flying.
So he accomplishes it by covertly installing thousands of dollars of hardware on PUBLIC land and opening himself up to thousands more dollars in recovery fees? Not likely.
I don't think iOS's SOS feature is feasible from a paraglider. You have to point it at a specific direction for a while to get a message out. An air band radio at 121.500 (emergency frequency) would make more sense (with the required permits of course)
InReach should work well though from a paraglider as a primary SOS.
From a paraglider: we are definitely paying attention to the new iphone SOS feature, many of us who fly over wilderness areas carry a spot or in-reach. We never activate in the air (no point), so having to point it in a specific direction is not an issue. Being blocked by limbs or terrain would be an issue.
Some people carry air-band radios, but largely we use the ham frequencies. Air band would be of limited utility for emergencies since we would just be using an aircraft as a relay to ATC to SAR. Satellite trackers have one button that does all of that without having to deal with air-band.
Ok I've never flown paragliders, but I have flown regular gliders. We did have air band radios on board anyway - not just for emergencies but also to communicate with other air traffic of course. Today they even have to carry ADS-B transponders, but when I did it that rule was not in place yet.
I'm surprised you use the ham frequencies, I'm also a ham but if I wasn't it would be a bit annoying having to study for the ham exam just because I would want to paraglide. For the air band there is another procedural exam here in Europe but that's ok because you really need to know how to behave on that band. But the ham exam is really focused on building your own radios which a paraglider would have no need for.
You can see where all the Helium hotspots are. They have a mechanism called Proof Of Coverage so that they can be used to tell devices communicating with them what their geolocation is. It's pretty easy to tell which devices are on top of the mountains over salt lake.
It’s got to be some sort of Multi Level Marketing thing. You buy three towers, sell your friends three towers, they sell 3 towers each. Boom. Money. Wait, that is actually a good idea for a mesh network.
That's actually how the stupid Helium network was setup.. it used to (maybe still does?) provide rewards for setting up a hotspot and much much less for data throughput so it was basically a big grift to sell miners. Then they gave a huge proportion of the earliest miners to their executives and family members so that commoners buying miners were basically just funneling money to the execs.
It seems like it would be pretty easy to stand near one of these with a frequency counter, or even a handheld Yeasu FT-60 and find out what frequency it's using. It would be very clear if it was relaying data or voice as well. From there you could take that frequency and figure who would be using it and what for.
I love how it's "public" land just as long as it goes completely unutilized.
Seriously though, it's heartbreaking to see the governments pervasive take on conservation of land. Here in MA the policy is to basically locate every trail in every woods, install a gate in front of it, add a sign to kick out all the OHRVs that made the trail in the first place, put a bunch of benches and signage and what amounts to trash all over the place, and then add another sign inviting all the crunchy granola Karen's to come walk their dog and do yoga in nature.
Because appearantly riding 4 wheelers is bad. Kids should be on the streets doing drugs instead. And only Karen's go to town meetings so they are the only ones who get a voice. My taxes don't count.
Definitely a helium miner in play here. Plenty of pics on reddit where people have built self-powered deployments, solar charges a battery inside, 4g for internet access, and mine away helium all day long. Was very profitable 14-24 months ago but HNT crypto price has plummeted and helium founders pretty much bet the same type of deployment could happen for 5g deployments which has pretty much been a disaster. 5g implementations require more $$$ equipment and pricey antennas, and a complex setup with a limited range.
The appeal of these helium miners was a very simple setup and low cost. I'd seen offers for people who work on cell towers in SLC to rent space for these miners. Plenty of places in the SLC that can reach a large % of the valley without having to go that high. I still have a single miner running in Vegas that has a 50km reach from a residential house with a single 5.8dbi antenna. Could easily put one on a hilltop but doubtful it would help. I highly doubt the cartel is invested in these, very low data throughput which why IoT devices are the target market.
I always assumed these helium miners were doing some weird radio data collection, IP obfuscation, or something. There has to be some incentive behind getting people to set up these radios everywhere.
Being paid in HNT crypto to run the device. With a $250 box and the HNT pricing around $15-$20 and on the rise, people were making thousands mining a 100+ coins a month deployed in a half decent location. The buying demand for these miners went through the roof and people were waiting 9-12 months to get one. Easy to buy one now but likely only to mine around 4 coins a month due to halving and price decline. HNT coin is around $1.70 right now.
Helium is a "proof-of-coverage" crypto system: "Proof-of-Coverage is a unique work algorithm that uses radio waves to validate Hotspots are providing legitimate wireless coverage."
The more people that see you, better chance your miner is involved with proof of coverage to get a mining reward. It's still just a radio wave so "line of site" improves everything.
The one thing I like about them is the mapping of Proof of Work onto a thing of value in the real world. I think it's a pretty strange thing of value to have selected and there are better behaviors out there to encourage.
I know someone they interviewed for a job last year and he said they were cashed up with years of runway but I also know they have a very bad rep in the LoRa equipment vendor space based on conversations although moved on to the LTE CBRS innovation band from what I can tell.
Last I looked into it they locked down the supported hardware pretty aggressively and I could never trace a clear line on how the "proof of coverage" was validated. The physical aspects of radio transmission that are unforgeable are a bit hard to do without dedicated hardware and large distances(ex: time of flight for GPS).
The RF nerd in me thinks it could be interesting but the skeptic makes me wonder how forgeable coverage would be and if the overhead of coverage challenges uses more of the limited spectrum than carrying actual data.
It's kind of a joke, the entire thing is relying on the locked down hardware as it contains the keys that generate coins. You can set up your own mini network that only sees / validates your own nodes and get rewarded. The solution they came up with is a CSV of "bad" nodes. No joke.
I don't know how much they have changed the incentive structure lately, but the original goal was to build-out a large LoRa network and then transition it to have a business model based on customers buying access tokens and spending them as their packets get carried by the Helium network.
LoRa networks are not IP networks until the LoRa packets reach the internet edge and get backhauled to gateways that then deliver them to the owners of the data collected over LoRa. So anyone trying WiFi packet sniffing is barking up the wrong radio, and wrong layer 2.
Thing is, LoRa is not that big a business for commercial network operators, never mind oddball blockchain-based network operators. A lot of LoRa is deployed for a single purpose or application by the organization building both the sensors and the data collection network.
> Was very profitable 14-24 months ago but HNT crypto price has plummeted and helium founders pretty much bet the same type of deployment could happen for 5g deployments which has pretty much been a disaster.
When I looked into it, very little of the Helium miner payouts were coming from people using the network. Most of the payouts were from the network minting HNT to reward node operators, which they then cashed out by selling HNT to people on exchanges.
The obvious problem is that this model only works as long as the speculative value of the HNT token remains high. Once the speculative demand for HNT disappears, getting actual cash in exchange for mining operations is going to become very hard. Supposedly the operators planned on having actual end users pay to use the network, but that demand has been minimal so far.
They also had some problems where people discovered how to game the system and extract a lot of the rewards without providing much actual coverage. I don't know if they overcame these or not.
Like most crypto things, being early to the speculative game was the only way to make money. I suspect a lot of late arrivals who haven't even received their backordered miners yet are going to be in for some losses.
I am mostly anti-crypto but I always thought the concept of Helium was cool. If the "price" was competitive with LTE-M and NB-IoT (I'm not sure if it was, maybe it is now?) what stopped people from using it?
I've worked on low data rate projects that would be a good fit for the Helium network.
Biggest issue was uncertainty about the future of the network. The only reason people were interested in running nodes was to collect payouts, denominated in the Helium token. If the Helium token price crashes (as it has), the network will stop expanding at best and start shrinking at worst.
Meanwhile, regular cellular data contracts dropped to relatively low prices for low data applications. When retail pricing starts at $1/month, you can imagine how cheap we're getting contracts for 10,000 devices locked in over multi-year contracts.
Also, the Helium founders seem to have realized they squeezed everything they can out of their first project, so they switched their attention to a new 5G project to try to repeat their token-fueled success once more before crypto speculation ran out of steam. They didn't quite make it.
Registration of a hotspot and asserting its location costs the miner 50,000,000 Data Credits, plus 2x65,000 DC in transaction fees. Registration fees for receiving packages has a fixed fee of tens of millions of DC too. Meanwhile, transferring a single 24-byte package over the network costs the user 1 DC - which is equivalent to $.00001.
I live in a medium-density city, and there are 50+ miners within a half-mile radius from me. Considering IoT is designed for low-volume data, there is no way packet payout will ever come remotely close to the network fees itself. The protocol was designed to reward proof-of-coverage at first, slowly switching to rewarding data forwarding.
What we are seeing right now is that the data volume simply doesn't exist, and the proof-of-coverage was showing a false demand. Even if it were to see widespread use, it would still not live up to expectations.
And if you are a commercial user, why would you mess around with Helium rather than just contracting one of the well-known commercial IoT parties? Even if a commercial provider is 100x as expensive you are still only paying $.001 / package.
I've been interested in cryptocurrencies back when they were still called "hashcash" so this whole corruption of the original ethos really hits me in the feels.
I remember reading a Tor article (blog post maybe? Cannot find it anymore) about the "revenue model", and why they settle on donations only (mostly?). Back then I was interested in the Nym model (a mixnet trying to use a "proof of mix" to pay the nodes for their work). It's been a while, so take it with a grain of salt.
I found it very interesting to see that Tor had actually considered paying to encourage nodes (different technical solutions), but decided against it for a philosophical reason: if you run a node for profit, chances are that you don't really care about helping the project ("you just want money"). So it's a risk to attract "bad actors". And they don't want that.
I think there is a similar argument to make for all those services trying to use cryptocurrencies to attract nodes: those "bad actors" will always optimize for their profit, not for the health of your service. Seems like it applies for Helium, too.
If you go on the Helium subreddit, there are many posts from people saying that their Helium modems took several months to ship, and the modems themselves are completely overpriced for what they do.
I have deployed similar-looking devices in places like volcanoes in Ecuador. On each of these boxes we put a prominent message in Spanish and English: "This is sensitive research equipment, please do not touch" with contact information.
Anecdotally, the HF (shortwave) bands are on fire, lately. There's a lot of activity compared to 10 and 20 years ago. Broadcast and amateurs experimenting with digital HF. Also weird stuff. Just the other day I saw a very low rate OFDM signal emitting ~1 kHz wide AM tones several seconds long, across ~500 kHz of spectrum. Visible from receivers in Iceland and Australia. Unless regulations have changed recently, I'm pretty sure that mode is illegal in most countries for amateur radio operators. Could be military or government? If not, they're likely operating illegally. And they want to send a few bits per second, very reliably, probably global coverage with a cheap receiver. And the Internet isn't appropriate for that task.
In recent years, with signal processing, it has become possible to communicate, at very low speeds over HF with downright trivial equipment. 100 milliwatts or so, from a simple one-transistor sort of transmitter, running at say 0.1 or 0.01 baud, can go across the continent with a wire hanging out the window. With the right coding, software-defined radio can pick that kind of signal out from beneath the noise floor.
Similarly, with higher frequencies like UHF, the cost has come down to the point that individuals, or small groups, could construct their own large-area mesh networks. A dozen LoRa radios with microcontrollers, placed strategically, could cover a large urban area. $1000? Something like that.
It will also soon be possible for a small organization, or even an individual, to construct a satellite-based data network. Cubesats can be launched for just thousands of dollars each. It's possible to communicate with such satellites using readily-available and relatively cheap equipment. Someone will eventually realize they can launch some dozens of such cheap satellites, and have their own global low-bandwidth network. A new startup, Swarm, has already launched their first set of smartphone-sized satellites, which collect beacon/telemetry data.
I suppose my overall point is that low-bitrate radio at distance is getting easier and cheaper over time. And being able to send even 1000 bits per second between many points in an urban area between mobile devices, like LoRa-based mesh networks can do, would be a very valuable asset for an individual or organization to have, if normal communications were disrupted. Unlike a giant 10 kilowatt HF transmitter in the old days, it's kind of hard to pin down where the equipment even is, or what it's for, or who is using it. Once the cost is cheap enough, nodes in such a network are effectively disposable. Place and forget. This will be an upset for those who assume that if Internet access is controlled, most or all potential communication channels are controlled.
The ham radio folks have a hobby called QRP / QRS. Low-power operation. I think the idea is to go the farthest, the slowest, with the least power.
The WSPR project uses low-power beacons to study radio propagation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software) You can buy kits that transmit beacons quite a ways for like $50. Or build one from a few parts in the bin and a microcontroller with GPIO pins. Need a licence for any real output power, of course.
LoRa gives several kilometres, practically, in an urban area, with a little coil of wire as an antenna. It uses unlicensed spectrum at legal power limits. It will go much further if given decent antennas and if raised up in a good location. LoRa modules are $10 - $20. A brick-sized box, on top of a tall building, or a pole on a hill. It's standard mesh networking, just quite slow, low power, and long-range.
With 100 Milliwatt around the continent, wow, that’s crazy.
Would be interesting to see, what wallstreet would do with it.
Light speed in Fibre is Slow than RF, they are buying towers for direct connections via RF.
For low bandwidth, but time critical signals this could be a thing.
But what do I know :D
Unfortunately SNR and time are interrelated. A very weak signal can be strengthened, by comparing it over time. The longer it is present, the less likely what is being received is noise. But that process blurs things over time, unsure precisely when a change in the signal occurred. Depending on the power and speed, it could take many milliseconds, or even seconds, to say whether the signal has changed.
HF also has variable propagation. It doesn't always take the same path. So timing can be all over the place. Much lower frequencies (around 100 kHz instead of 10000 kHz) hug the ground, and their timing can be very precise. Low frequency was once used by navigation systems with ground-based transmitters. Takes huge antennas and transmitters to broadcast a strong enough signal for that. They were some of the biggest ever constructed.
HFT folks have found shortwave and are now experimenting on it. There are some FCC authorisations for experimental work by HFT folks.
Sadly they are notoriously secretive.
My money is on cartel. Putting equipment up with no regard for loss via confiscation means it's something very profitable. Complete disregard for laws also fits
The easiest way to find the owner/operator would be to carry a few cans of white spray paint in your backpack and paint the solar panels on every one that you find. Or, clean out your closet and haul your ill-fitting clothes up the hill and drape every one of the panels.
It won't take long for someone somewhere to start griping. Then you bust them and levy appropriate fines or penalties and force them to remove all of it, everywhere at their expense. Make an example out of them in the most humiliating manner legally allowed so that no one else ever thinks it will be a good idea.
I have replied to the other poster in this thread.
I understand that there may be some scientific value to these antennas and potentially a public benefit. That makes it even more ridiculous to me that those responsible chose not follow the rules around installing things like this on public lands since it is likely dead simple to gain support for something that will provide a clear public benefit, maybe even enough support that it effectively is paid for by the use of public monies. Clearly these people intended no public benefit or they would've lobbied locally for support.
You want to humiliate and make an example of someone for... putting antennas on public land? Sure it's not legal but that doesn't justify such a weird response. This is closer to painting graffitis than anything else, jesus christ.
> This is closer to painting graffitis than anything else, jesus christ.
There is a significant difference between these installations, which over time turns into several pounds of electronic waste at each spot, vs a few fluid ounces of spray paint used for tagging or grafiti.
It's in the interest for the public and for nature that these illegal installations be stopped.
I guess so? They are also very easy to dispose of, and as for the electronics waste part, it doesn't really make a difference since it would also be thrown out eventually even if it had permission to be there. To me, it seems very, very much easier to dispose of this than almost anything else. Again, fine whoever did this, but I still think humiliation and making an example out of this is such an extremely disproportionate response.
> I guess so? They are also very easy to dispose of
I take it you didn't read the article nor watch the video in the source. It took a full day's effort of several state workers to hike up, remove, and safely bring all that crap down in unsafe winter conditions.
That's similar to graffitis. I agree it's not great, but my point is about the proportionality of the response here imo. Do you really think this is worth such a vengeful response?
I agree with you about the impact of these antennas and also see the comparison of this with simple graffiti, which is also a huge problem today with so many social media idiots discovering that there are national parks and that they are completely unguarded where any fool can do any foolish thing for the cameras, including destroying irreplaceable pictographs or petroglyphs or stealing shards of pottery or arrowheads from archaeological sites that have not been investigated.
It is important to realize that private companies operating on public lands have specific rules they must follow for their access and their operations are subject to monitoring for compliance with all the rules in place.
Years ago I worked in Utah in Four Corners area on a geophysical crew. We operated mostly on public lands managed by the USFS (United States Forest Service) and BLM (Bureau of Land Management) for those who don't know. We operated up to the border of at least one National Park and needed to drive through for access to some locations that were adjacent to but not otherwise accessible from roads outside the park due to terrain features including rivers and deep canyons.
Our crews had bureau archaeologists leading the way across the land and flagging (to prevent access to) any areas with visible signs of prior habitation, cultural artifacts, petroglyphs and pictographs. Since the local environment was very fragile, our equipment had to operate in a narrow easement and damage to living vegetation could have caused us to be denied access and resulted in cancellation of our operating permit. Personnel were required to pack out everything that they packed in including food wrappers, food scraps and peels, cans and bottles, flagging, etc. BLM and USFS crews followed behind us to insure compliance. The idea presented to us in pre-stage meetings was that the client company had paid for the privilege to explore and that non-compliance with the simple rules of access would mean that our permit was invalidated. Losing a permit in the mid-80's in the oil and gas business meant that you likely had no job. That was in the early years of an extended bust in exploration that ended in the early 90's with the price increases and the rise of horizontal drilling.
I see no reason why any entity seeking to operate on public lands should not be required to follow the simple rules we followed. If they can't be bothered then they upon discovery they should be made to feel the full weight of non-compliance. Society has already defined a set of consequences and allowing everyone to escape consequences just results in an escalation of non-compliance.
It isn't just about putting antennas on public lands.
There are people who visit public lands and parks and paint graffiti on archaeological sites. I don't need to mention how destructive this can be and hope we can agree that destroying sites like this should be punished harshly.
Installing antennas without permission on public lands may not seem like a big deal but if everyone were allowed to go out and do whatever they wanted to do on public land then most of our public land would've been stripped bare decades ago.
There are rules in place that help us all find a common ground and baseline from which we can all operate without interfering with other's rights. Fees are designed so that operators on public lands pay royalties to the treasury for the right of access and production of public resources from public lands - mining, logging, oil and gas exploration, etc.
Someone has decided to ignore the process, avoid any fees, and to avoid asking permission. Perhaps they operate under the bullshit maxim that it's easier to ask forgiveness than to do the paperwork required to obtain permission especially if obtaining permission would expose themselves and their operations to too much scrutiny. Since an installation like this probably requires permits where the operator has to define their specific use case, potentially do some environmental impact and archaeological site study assessments, obtain radio spectrum broadcast licenses, etc then they would rather try to avoid paying for any of that while they reap the benefit of the network they are building and operating.
I see no reason not to throw the book at everyone involved including anyone who assisted in the installations by providing labor.
If this later turns out to be something with a clear public benefit then make them pay all costs of legalizing their operations and tack on all the costs associated with investigating these antennas, identifying them and removing any equipment before they became a legal operator. Use appropriate media to inform the general public about the process and the findings and the reasons for any penalties assessed. Appropriate media, not social media.
I personally don't have a problem with making them regret ever trying to become an exception to the rules they have decided to ignore.
When you consider that most access to public land for private uses comes with ridiculously low fees and relaxed rules there really is no excuse for non-compliance. Many of the fees for use have not been increased in decades and some may still date to the last part of the 19th century. With that in mind it makes no sense for anyone with a legitimate use case to avoid paying the fees and making it all above board unless they know in advance that gaining approval for their installations would not happen once those in charge of managing public lands understand what they intend to do.
Frankly, I'm tired of people and/or companies just going out and doing whatever they want to do ignoring all the rules and regulations that are in place and then escaping consequences when they are found to be operating outside the laws.
Humiliate them. Fine them. If existing penalties specify jail time then jail them. How many times would one need to do this before others decided to just follow the existing rules and carry on?
My guess: Some poor phD student whom neglected to fill out the required permissions with the FTC and BLM just lost $50K of equipment and has to decided if they should face the embarrassment (and possible fines) to claim it.
I need an archiver for my playlists, majority of the videos I've watched over the years have vanished from playlists with ZERO information or title remaining, making it forever a mystery as to what they used to be.
Crypto currency? Seriously, that was their first thought? I find it hard to believe. It sounds like something a journalist would come up with to make a story more interesting.
Also, if the boxes have antennas, what length are they? If these are not normal mobile phone frequencies perhaps they should contact FCC and ask if there are call signs for base stations at those locations. Perhaps some ham wasn't aware it is not permitted to leave such things on public land?
If not ham radio or other kind of tech enthusiast my first thoughts would be in order:
- relays for connectivity of some devices located in valleys so they are out of reach of lte/GPRS, but a relay on a peak is. For example, are there problems with unauthorised growing of plants in those mountains? Maybe grow monitoring.
- amateur weather monitoring/Ip cameras (they didn't say if the boxes were equipped with cameras
- animal photo traps
- some "prepper experiment" in building a mesh network
In any case this was a really disappointing article... They took a device down, but they didn't report anything about its internals. Does it have any easily readable storage? Usb drives, SD cards? Are pcbs off the shelf or custom made? Perhaps firmware can be dumped and clues can be found this way. Or it can be plugged in the lab and whatever it transmits can be analysed. Etc.
> Crypto currency? Seriously, that was their first thought? I find it hard to believe. It sounds like something a journalist would come up with to make a story more interesting.
Uh, you assumed that it's the mainstream ones like Bitcoin or Ethereum but there is a reasonable suspicion that it's a Helium node (https://www.helium.com). According to what I've learned last year their shtick is that deploying on places that have less physical Helium nodes allows you to collect more HNT tokens which you can allegedly convert into cash while Helium will sell bandwidth à la Sigfox (https://www.sigfox.com/). In this particular case (unauthorized placement plus the particular spacing) this theory is more likely than an ADB-S collector (you only need a single unit to collect all data for miles) or privately-deployed seismographs.
Or maybe they are used for fraud. Tunneling traffic through a sim card nobody knows about, which if located would be discovered in the mountains, well that's a blackhat dream
True but someone has to purchase the sim and top it up - money trail, plus there's physical evidence where did the box, solar, whatever's in it come from serial numbers etc more money trail as well as physical evidence to worry about. Plus - how long as it been there - what day did it come live - cameras covering trail enterances, nearby gas stations, what other phones pinged the mast that day etc. Plenty for the white hats to go at there.
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