Forty-channel CB radio is now world standard, and the equipment is mass-produced, cheap and reliable, so everyone can afford it. CB has a range in good conditions of about 40 kilometres.
So it's for rural areas - not just for voice, but also for monitoring and control information. Or it would be, if the SMA re-interpreted their rules to allow short bursts of data - even, if on only one or two of the forty channels, for a few seconds every hour.
However the SMA says that CB can only be used "for speech communications, and, if necessary, tone coding for signalling purposes related to speech communications only." This last refers to 'cell-call' tones which are DTMF-like tones used to trigger a wake-up in a specific CB unit.
This is a cheap technology which can raise the productivity and improve the life of farmers and graziers anywhere in rural areas and the outback.
Numerous country universities, farmers, electronics stores, and back-yard inventors have seen the potential here. They want to use standard off-the shelf CB equipment for monitoring, switching, alarm signalling, etc. in the outback, and they've been lobbying the government and the SMA for years. But to no avail.
