Mexican cartels build radio network for military precision December 28, 2011
When convoys of soldiers or federal police move through the scrubland of northern Mexico, the Zetas drug cartel knows they are coming.
The alert goes out from a taxi driver or a street vendor, equipped with a high-end handheld radio and paid to work as a lookout known as a "halcon," or hawk.
The radio signal travels deep into the arid countryside, hours by foot from the nearest road. There, the 2-meter-tall dark-green branches of the rockrose bush conceal a radio tower painted to match. A cable buried in the dirt draws power from a solar panel.
[Moderator snip]Read more:
Ham radio operators in the U.S. and Mexico have been constructing and using repeaters since the 1970's. This is the kind of "fluff" piece that reporters come up with when they have a hangover and feel like phoning it in.
Instead of trying to make a radio repeater seem like a whiz-bang achievement, AP's reporters would get a lot more respect if they followed the trails of the drugs and the money that paid for the radios: the reason they choose not to is left as an exercise for the reader.
Bill Horne Moderator