If someone is going to run with this idea, I very sincerely ask that you please do it in one of the locations marked on this map. Then my company will be able to operate a 1990s-technology cellular phone network in the proposed neo-Amish town, a network that will enable 1990s GSM cellphones to actually work! And I do mean it with full seriousness - the linked website is my actual company, with all attendant legal and contact info.

Out of the set of locations marked on the linked map, I strongly prefer the ones in Oregon. I and the rest of my founding team are based in California, and I am a trans woman - hence certain places are, quite sadly, simply unsafe for to me travel to, let alone the intricate tasks of building towers, installing equipment and then operating and maintaining it. There are no PCS spectrum vacancies in our home state of CA, but OR is close, has good spectrum available, and it is a lovely state with strong LGBTQ+ rights.

A little data point on the whole marriage thing... I and my life partner have been together for 20 y, will be 21 in September. We never got married and we don't have any rings. I keep hearing that a lot of marriages these days don't last this long.

We do informally call each other "my wife", but still, no formal marriage was ever done.

Welcome to the post-op side of the rainbow, sister! I got mine back in 2021 in Mexico. 😄

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the rich and powerful seeking immortality is nothing new.

Hell no, I would never reverse it even if it were possible - I love being a woman!

I looked into it some more, and it appears harder than I originally thought when I made this post. How do you ban someone (as a community mod, not an instance admin) if they have only drive-by downvoted and not commented? If someone posts or comments, I can clink the the 3 dots icon next to their post or comment, and there is an option to ban them from the community. But if they only downvoted, I don't see any place to enter a ban against them. Am I overlooking something? Where should I look?

he’s deeply and upsettingly afraid of dying,

There is a very old tale about a powerful tyrant who had all Earthly power, then became very upset when he realized his mortality.

Where in the world is this bus stop with that message on it? Or is it a photoshopped image, and there is no actual bus stop that says this?

Anyways, in other news, due to a supremely nightmarish interaction with police, i am now out to the entire state of oregon!

So sorry to hear this part, sister! But I also have to ask: how safe or unsafe is Oregon for trans women in general? I live in CA, but I am fascinated with OR, both its beauty and certain specialties that are available only there. Maps by Erin In The Morning show OR as being among the safest states, just like CA - but from your (apparently) horrible experience, I now have to wonder if maybe that assessment is inaccurate?

I am a professional telecom engineer, and I am a co-founder of a non-profit organization that seeks to build a new non-profit cellular phone network based on retro 2G technology - see the Retro Mobile Phones community I recently started in the Fediverse. Oregon is at the top of the list of locations we are after, because it has significant spectrum vacancies (portions of GSM-compatible radio spectrum that aren't already claimed and taken by some big company) and it appears to be a safe and friendly state, as opposed to Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas etc - other states in which similar spectrum vacancies exist. But in light of your posted experience I am now worried - hence I would like some further clarification.

My partner and I did travel to Oregon last November for exploration: we arrived in Eugene by Amtrak train (I avoid flying as much as possible), then rented a car and drove out east to explore some of those spectrum vacancy areas. We didn't have any negative interactions, and we absolutely loved McKenzie river - but perhaps we were just lucky?

Please elaborate on your comment. What do you mean by "managed a 2G website"? The technology we advocate for, whose proper name is GSM but which is more commonly referred to as 2G because it is a "second generation" cellular tech, is a voice call technology that has nothing to do with websites or Internet.

Or are you asking how we put up a website for our non-profit company? If that is the question, then I don't see what is so mysterious: our website is currently just one HTML page, simple enough to be hand-coded in vi, and that method is indeed how I made it...

Or are you asking how we managed to create and run the actual company behind the website? Now here the answer is extreme devotion and dedication, my friend! I gave decades of my life to GSM technology, in my previous project going back to 2011 I sought to design and build my own GSM phone handset, hence I have just the right combination of qualifications and dedication to pursue my new/current idea of building a replacement network for the one that was wrongfully shut down. Just earlier this month the evil overlords of T-Mobile USA shut down their nationwide GSM/2G network; while everyone in r/vintagemobilephones on Reddit only cried and lamented, I gritted my teeth and kept working.

I might have and old iDEN handset knocking around somewhere.

I am a GSM gal through and through... Someone else recently developed a "full stack", RF to core, implementation for CDMA (see 1xBTS), but I am not aware of anything for iDEN.

I wouldn’t have thought the spectrum for 2G would still be available for public use.

In major metropolitan or otherwise densely populated areas, every bit of spectrum is claimed and spoken for, nothing left. However, USA is a large country, and some very remote and rural areas (the kind that would be called "middle of nowhere", "god-forsaken place" or BFE) have spectrum vacancies. My non-profit company seeks to deploy and operate in some of those areas.

In oregon, prisons and jails are segregated by AGAB,

AGAB or genital anatomy? Has there ever been a test case to distinguish between the two? I.e., a case involving very specifically a post-op person who underwent an old-fashioned, 1970s-style 100% sex change?

How active is that train track? Meaning how often does a train run on it? And when trains do pass on that track, how fast do they go?

Don't get me wrong, sister, when I was in my teens in Russia in 1990s, I loved walking along railway tracks exactly like you do in that picture. But we really don't want to have any of our lives claimed by unexpectedly passing trains - so you need to be very aware and very certain that you can get out of the way if a train approaches!

I personally had my partner pick mine,

Wow, same with me! Nice to meet another sister who got named the same way - this manner of naming seems to be very rare overall..

Cops suck everywhere all the time always.

Of course, this part is a given, it's in the very nature of their institution - but the exact level of danger faced by a trans woman in such encounters will probably be quite different from one jurisdiction to another.

Decades ago post-op trans women were 100% safe: in 1980s, 1990s etc if you had female genitalia between your legs, no one would ever stuff you into a men's jail or prison. It didn't matter if those female parts were there from birth or if they were constructed in surgery - female parts between legs meant women's jail or prison. You were likewise guaranteed female ID documents if you were post-op. But today's evildoers have scooped to lows that never previously existed in all of human history, treating post-op trans women as male and stuffing 100% anatomical females into men's institutions.

I am a post-op trans woman. I got my SRS primarily in the hope that it would make me safe - but now it is still not enough. Hence I am asking how it is in Oregon: are they Trump-level evil too, to the point that they would stuff an anatomically female person with men because her female parts weren't there from birth? Some of the wording in your original post kind of points in this direction - when you say they asked you "What genital were you born with?", questions about surgeries and "Safe around other men or no?", it sounds like you got woman parts, but the evil pigs were still looking to stuff you with men because those parts weren't birth-made - unless I totally misunderstood your meaning and intent in those passages, in which case I apologize in advance. But being a post-op woman myself, now I am understandably worried if I would be in danger of treated like a man or stuffed with men in Oregon if some unfortunate encounter with state-sponsored terrorists goes the wrong way.

Yes, yes, a million times yes!

Would you be OK with shifting the location just a tiny bit eastward, from Bend OR to Prineville OR? Crook County (which hosts Prineville) has vacant/unclaimed PCS spectrum, so we can operate our own 1990s cellular phone network, while Deschutes County (which hosts Bend and Sisters) unfortunately lacks the same. And yes, I and my team did explore that area with actual boots on the ground in the fall of 2025, less than a year ago.

Update: yesterday I got the first version of this idea actually working. The hardware set laid out on the back seat of my car is exactly like I planned in my original post: a sysmoBTS 1002, a Raspberry Pi model 3B+, an LTE modem in USB stick form factor plugged into the RPi, and an Ethernet cable connecting the RPi to the sysmoBTS. The RPi needs 5V power and takes it in via a micro-USB power input connector; sysmoBTS 1002 needs the same 5V, but has a barrel-type power input connector. I got a cable that goes from USB-A plug to the right barrel connector for the sysmoBTS, plus a regular USB A to micro-B cable to power the RPi - so now I only need two USB-A power ports for the whole assembly. For my initial tests I used an adapter that provides USB-A 5V from the car's "cigarette lighter" power port - in my car this port remains powered even when the engine is off, so I could lock my car and walk away with the setup still powered. This method works, but is quite dangerous in that I could run down the car starter battery and leave myself stranded if I run it for too long.

In terms of software and logical functionality, the RPi connects to the Internet via LTE, establishes a WireGuard tunnel with one of my servers acting as the MSC, and then acts as the BSC between this distant MSC and the sysmoBTS next to it. The Linux distro I run on this RPi is Devuan - the moral principle of not using systemd is important to me! Devuan still comes with NetworkManager and ModemManager though, with nmcli and nmtui configuration tools, so I used those tools to configure automatic bring-up of LTE mobile Internet connection and a static IP assignment on the local Ethernet that connects to the sysmoBTS and also allows management access for me. My own custom rc.local script then configures WireGuard and starts osmo-bsc and osmo-mgw processes. Those Osmocom components were built from source: Osmocom provides prebuilt binaries for systemd-based distros, but not for more principled Devuan. OsmoBSC running on the car-resident RPi connects to OsmoSTP on my MSC server, with SCTP connection running inside the WireGuard tunnel over public Internet accessed via LTE. RTP streams for voice calls also run inside the same WireGuard tunnel.

Aside from the danger of running down the car starter battery if I leave this setup on for too long with the car engine off, system performance is mostly OK in the initial round of tests: I can walk a little bit away from my parked car and still have usable signal, and voice quality was mostly OK in my limited tests so far. Going forward, I plan to buy a high-capacity USB power bank (60 Ah is the biggest I found) and use it as the power source for this back seat BTS instead of the car starter battery - then I will be able to exercise this system a little more thoroughly without risk of stranding myself. To be continued...

I absolutely, wholeheartedly support this idea!

Dear user - it looks like you created a Lemmy account just to participate in this little community! If so, here is my warmest welcome, my fellow human!

Your chosen username: is your dislike of AT&T based on them shutting down their GSM network in 2017, or their ongoing push to kill all traditional copper land lines? Or something else altogether? Also, are you someone whom I might know from either Reddit or Discord vintagemobilephones communities?

Are you aware that TMO are now saying that they plan to shut down what is left of their GSM/2G network on August 3? As a short-term (immediate) fix for my own personal use, I am about to start working on the interim solutuon described in this other post - but longer term, the original mission of A2GC continues unchanged. Once I finish the little detour that is the subject of the other linked post, I will get back to working on the new MSC for A2GC, and then get back to some further improvements in OsmoBSC for driving large macrocell BTS - both of which are needed for new above-ground [*] GSM network deployment.

[*] Here I use the term "above ground" to mean the opposite of the non-literal, figurative meaning of "underground".