ROllerozxa on Nostr: A while back I was talking to someone about whether it was possible to set up your ...

A while back I was talking to someone about whether it was possible to set up your own GSM cell tower for 2G connectivity to try to revive old feature phones now that 2G is dead in many parts of the world. The idea would be to have something that would broadcast on the GSM wavelengths and communicate with the phone, then have it act as a proxy to allow for browsing the internet and sending SMS or making phone calls, which would be proxied to some kind of Internet service.

Of course, just broadcasting a tower on the GSM spectrum is highly illegal because of how it can cause surrounding phones that still listen in on old 2G networks to connect to that and mess up emergency services and whatever else.

However this would still be really interesting to do in a controlled environment where it won't leak signals into the background. Supposedly there are SDRs that can broadcast on GSM frequencies, and apparently you can target it such that you basically wire it up to the RF receiver on the phone, though I'm not sure where that is on my phone and I assume I'd need to disassemble it to get to it.