“The tourists probably missed it, but back in 2011, a Trellisware Technologies team boarded the USS Midway, a decommissioned aircraft carrier operating as a naval museum in San Diego, and conducted a test. Armed with Android devices tethered to tiny software-defined radios, the group wanted to see what it would take to push a signal from the bowels of the ship, past the pipes, bulkheads and metal doors, to the outside world.

And so one man stayed behind in the engine room while the rest of the team took positions throughout the aircraft carrier. As the person in the engine room started recording video, the imagery traveled over the impromptu radio network, hopping from node to node until it made its way to the flight deck, where it was zapped to someone else five miles away. In all, it took just four handhelds to communicate across a notoriously disruptive environment.”