My buddy’s Zombie Plan (his post-apocalypse survival plan), requires a limited few people to be able to set up telephone service between two towns. From what I understand, his plan has some kind of “fort” and “outpost” kind of thing happening.
Would this be doable? If one of his co-survivors was an electrician and he had a somewhat reliable power source like a wind farm, would it be feasible for him to get phone service to work between two cities, like say 150 miles apart?
Assume there is no zombie sabotage, the survivors must just get phone srevice working between two towns in order to re-establish society.
For 150 miles apart, wireless is the way to go and much simpler.
Powering a small phone system within a fort or small walled town would not take much if you went back to the system used early on with switchboard operators doing the connecting. Telephones systems us DC power and do not transmit over long distances well without a boost, so there would be a lot of problems keeping up a line of 150 miles.
But how would the wireless system work if world-wide infrastructure is toast? Would the towers still bounce the signal to the right place? How would cellphones be programmed?
Ah, I wasn’t clear in my OP. My buddy wishes to use land lines in addition to shortwave radio etc. (I think his plan is to take over an army base, FWIW.)
Wireless (if by that you mean simple radio) would be the best/easiest way to go. Of course, unless you have some good radio techs maintaining the systems (and lots o spare parts), in the long run you’d be fucked.
You could probably using existing cable for land lines (the power for your 150 miles thing shouldn’t be all that great), but you’d need someone who has a familiarity with the layer one infrastructure to sort out the lines (unless you are planning to lay your own cable I suppose). I would guess most of the current switching infrastructure would be toast if it was left sitting around getting pissed on by zombies and such for months or years.
Assuming you could get up a 19th century tech base in your forts, and assuming you could protect the work crews from being eaten by zombies, and assuming you could maintain the cable plant…well, I won’t say it would be easy, mind, but you could do it. Not sure if it would be worth the effort though.
I recall the early system needed boosting for any long line transmission. Today’s systems would not even work well without powering up a lot of equipment along the way.
I don’t understand the hardship with maintaining many wireless two-way radios between the locations. Radio technology is fairly simple. There are many books on building and maintaining them and no Zombies to worry about this way.
Curious, a phone system is nice and all, but what about a food supply? Where is that coming from? How do these societies maintain farms with Zombies about?
Wouldn’t the switching be computer controlled and therefore useless? (I have no idea why, but my buddy wants to be able to send faxes. Something about “sharing diagrams” so that one engineer or doctor or something could send instructions to the outpost.)
I think he’s planning on setting up the phones after the zombies have already starved to death. His idea of zombies is more “28 Weeks Later” rather than “undead”. I’m only interested in his plans for restoring civilization because it could be useful if aliens abducted 95% of the population or something.
He has different detailed plans for food and water.
You say phone service here, but phone line in the thread title, so I’m thinking you might just want a talk pair between the two towns. I’m referring to a single pair of wires, permanently connected and powered to enable a telephone conversation. (We used to use a device called a Throwmaster to do this on telco cables, using a wire pair that was not in use to communicate between the central office and a work site.) Here’s a device to just provide talk power; you could also google “Throwmaster” and find modern versions of the devices I used to use. I’d say, your hope of powering a line with a windmill is quite doable; if you’re trying to power up a switch for direct-dialing and custom calling services, you have a harder row to hoe. For 150 miles, you might need to wire around intervening, dead CO’s for a single-pair hookup, and signal boosting will be required (or you can yell, like we did on long-distance calls when I was a kid). We used to splice in things called repeaters, but I was just construction, and don’t really know how they worked.
And what happens when you fry your last 200 microfarad capacitor and the broadcast circuitry won’t work without it? You won’t be able to run down to Radio Shack to get a replacement.
Well, it uses switches (I know…doh!). And yes, they are electronic and wouldn’t probably survive…I doubt you could use more than the layer one infrastructure if it wasn’t maintained until your survival colony was up and running.
I guess it all hinges on to what level humanity falls before these kinds of enclaves form. My guess is people would be more concerned with survival and actually keeping the ROAD infrastructure open (for trade and support) than with being able to talk to each other instantly. If they wanted to keep communications open then they’d be better off with radio or even some kind of physical link (such as road, perhaps air, maybe a rail spur, etc). You could always send the message via something like the pony express after all…150 miles isn’t all that far even if you end up having to resort to horses (which, if you couldn’t maintain the tech base you’d be down to anyway).
For simple low quality voice I think it would be do-able. You may need to put up power relays, but I don’t see why you couldn’t do it…I just think you’d be worried about other things and not bother as it would be labor intensive and IMHO not worth the effort.
You would have to rebuild new radios from scratch essentially. Not impossible, but doubt you’d want to make the effort. You COULD use existing radio systems of course, but you would need to make sure you had lots of spare parts (most have solid state components now)…and people who know how to fix them. I suppose you could find really old radio systems somewhere…but again, without the tech base to maintain them all the books in the world won’t help.
Still, if communications like this were important (over all the food and other concerns…weapons would be one of my priorities after the food), then I agree…radio would be the best way to go. (this all assumes LOS and such of course, or some easy way to relay the signal). Just don’t get used to it or rely on it in the long term…unless you have the tech base to support it indefinitely.
The way he described it, it all sounded more like whatever phone system they used in MAS*H. He wants at least one phone that could be manned by Corporal Radar O’Reilly.
Don’t they send weather charts and stuff to ship at sea using shortwave? If he could power up that system, he could still be able to send faxes right?
(Seriously, I have no idea why faxes are so important to him, but he insists on being able to share information and diagrams.)
Faxes require a cleaner signal than Voice. It sounds like he should plan on running and maintaining 2+ lines with 25 twisted pair cable with a heavy covering. Trenching would be better but tougher than poles. This system would need some level of redundancy to be useful.
Early systems required a device called a loading coil every 6000 feet. I can’t find the distance that the Amplifiers allowed. It should be more, but I serious doubt from what I recall that it would be close to 150 miles. I guess while they are running the telephone wires, they can run some power lines.
Oh, and I just got an email from him, he said this would be implemented after things are generally stable and running at both his “town” and “outpost”. So the zombies/aliens are already dead/gone, food supplies are in reasonably good shape, and basic power is already up and running (I think his zombie plan involves going straight to where there’s a windfarm or hydroelectric power happening.)
Isn’t standard telephone (Off-Hook) voltage more like 48VDC? At least in the US.? Maybe it’s been changed as they’ve moved to almost universal use of touch-tone electronic phones. I believe an old ‘passive’ rotary dial phone should still work on today’s systems.
Perhaps 24VDC is used on “in-building” local switching systems where the phones are all know to be electronic?
But I though service from the Telco for a home-style line (PRI?) was still 48VDC.