reply to post by Marrr
The NTS uses road sensors similar to the NTTR and Groom. If you monitor the NTS repeater system, the rule is you call "birddog" and tell them you
are going to trip a sensor. They don't put it that way, but that is the basic idea. The person in the field just says they are crossing such and such
and state how many people are in the vehicle and some estimate of how long they will be in the area. The NTTR works the same way. They have large
barrels around the range with markings.. You get on the radio and say who you are and the nomenclature on the barrel. At the border, there are signs
to indicate how to tell the base your are crossing an alarmed gate. Here are two example:
I don't have a photo handy of a barrel with numbers. You can see one if you head to the back gate and then hang a left at the last "free" road.
Here is one for Yucca Mountain:
Anyway, the range is alarmed for vehicles. The place is crawling with wild life, so it would be hard to track down every critter wandering the area.
The sensors are put at "choke points": gates and road intersections. Potentially you could just take a ATV, avoid roads, and get quite far into the
range. [Just a guess on my part.] Now the NTS has done many studies on using ground surveillance radar to detect people and cars at any point on the
range. The studies are in the DOE archive. I don't know if such sensors have been implemented. At Base Camp, I suspect they were fiddling with ground
surveillance radar as shown in this photograph:
It is quite possible they (NTS, NTTR, Groom) are tracking the presence of cell phones, but note this is far more difficult that you think. You need to
see the cell phone from three towers to do TDOA (Time Delay of Arrival) analysis. Often all you get from the phone company is that the tower was used
(pinged), but there are cars driving all along route 95 using those towers. [I did some analysis for a search and rescue team in Joshua Tree, and got
to see some Verizon data.]
I think the range just uses tight security where needed (like the DAF), knowing that there isn't a whole lot some clown can do just wandering the
range, other than harm himself or die trying. But get close to something that matters, and they probably have microwave beams, FLIR, etc.
So one guy on foot traveling at night in a place they really don't care much about...yeah, it could happen.
