If you could have a copy of one publicly-accessible database, which would you take?

[hmelton]

The solar powered computer laptop is one very big radio transmitter and It is actually very hard to keep the laptop or for that matter any digital device from transmitting on multiple radio bands and when you put something like that in the middle of a area with no other electronics it's going to stand out like a house on fire.

But will it connect to wi-fi? The point to taking out the radio is that you're not getting any updates.

Are you meaning purposely stranded on a desert Island and determined not to escape just use the data base you are carrying in the laptop to survive?

If you put me on that desert Island with a solar powered laptop I'd have a wide band spark transmitter built in a couple of days at the most and unless I made a mistake still be able to use the  laptop, the admittedly crude and weak radio would be transmitting near constant SOS and if the Island is overflown by any aircraft or depending on the solar cycle the SOS would be picked up by HAM radio and located and have me off the Island in hours, days or weeks at worst.


Uh any laptop wi-fi transmitter powerful enough to have a chance to connect to another wi-fi from a desert Island is going to literally be lethal to you and the animals and vegetation on the Island. Wi-fi  even the oldest standards for laptop radios are in the microwave band any wi-fi transmitter with a range of more than a few dozen feet is dangerous to be within touching distance of  in the long and short terms.  The microwave power levels needed for a laptop to transmit off a desert island would possibly set fires and give you microwave burns.

The best range I know of obtain from existing mostly safeh Wi-fii transmitters is about 50 miles using two large repurposed ?5 meter? satellite dishes pointed at each other and high enough to get over the curvature of the Earth over the water.  One was on a tall hill above a research facility on a coastal Island being researched by a university and the other dish was set up on a tower at one of the universities shore buildings.

HDM