alt Hacker NewsWorst case disaster relief scenarios during the first weeks-months, before all of the gear shows up. Historically there have been some pretty big wins from using what's around to do stuff it's otherwise pretty bad at.
Have attended a few tech-focused talks from disaster relief people, I can't recall specific examples sadly. I only remember being surprised by the amount of time the first people to show up and help had to spend working under assumptions that needed to be made because of the complete lack of ability to communicate and coordinate. Very basic things like when and where helicopters/boats are going, and who has what. IIRC it was after a devastating tsunami
Sure, but in that circumstance this seems like an even worse solution. This requires hardware as well as uptime on services that you have no control over.
In the scenario you are describing (disaster relief) the simplest solution is to use what is already available. That would be the cheap radar set that you bought for the purpose of being a radar set for the port, or simply asking to have access to any of the dozens of existing radar sets already installed on most of the boats in port.
My point is that this uses additional hardware and an outside dependency (transmitting cell sites or other RF sources) to replace very affordable, ruggedized, reliable, safety-critical hardware that already exists. If your port control needs radar, the solution is to get a radar, not to pioneer a new technology that is almost as good as radar when it works correctly.