Cell Broadcast 2023

I installed that months ago, of course.
Haven’t enabled the messages yet.
Nice and quiet without them.

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For a meaningful test, you’d need someone to trigger a cell broadcast message.
That way, you’d be able to see whether the L5 actually receives and displays the message.

If it happens every first Monday of the month at noon, I would say that is reliable enough for a meaningful test.

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One thing about turning something on, sometimes it isn’t intuitive how to turn it off.

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Documentation and manuals help with accomplishing that goal.

it’s a tick box

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It’s awalys a tick box. The problem is finding it. Not necessarily this subject item, but as a general rule.

I’m not in Europe, I wouldn’t know where it hides. But then again I don’t need to know either. It is like when you’re going through your phone settings: “Oh THAT’S where it is!” (and you never knew it was there until you see it). Or like that thread earlier this year, a fellow didn’t know how to change his phone call volume until someone told him here where it was and when (but it was a slider not a tick box).

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The bm818 tool just serves to turn CB on in the modem, it is no indication that the system is implemented or supposed to be working.
CB messages are different from SMS and modem-manager needs to be modified to handle CB messages, as well as some client application that does something with it.

On the Pinephone, the Near-FOSS modem firmware, handles CB messages and forwards them as a fake SMS to the user.

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In the United States, there is supposed to be a nationwide test Wednesday 10/4/23 at 2:20 PM ET. I will try to remember to enable CBS shortly before and see if the L5 receives it.

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Just tried, didn’t seem to show on my side…

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Same here. I turned it on shortly before and didn’t get any message.

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Just went off for everyone else, so maybe a python frontend for dealing with CB as a forewarder to Chatty would be a good way to do it?

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Maybe we can commondeer that code as an addition to the L5?

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That seems likely. I don’t know how to code so I shall leave it to experts to chime in further

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I did not enable CBS – no desire. At the appointed time, the office lit up with all the spyphones receiving the broadcast. On my desk sat two phones… a spyDroid with no SIM and my L5, both in suspend. The spyDroid woke up and displayed the text message (audio was inhibited). The L5 actually woke up, but displayed nothing.

Did the modem wake the phone because it received the broadcast?

Any chance the modem replied back to the Bad Guys??

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Because the modem is blackbox software … if the modem is not killed then you have no way of knowing the answer to that.

The documented protocol does not provide for any kind of response by the handset - but of course I can’t rule out some exceptional, backdoor case.

Bear in mind that a non-killed modem engages in chat with the tower anyway (regardless of cell broadcast).

Probably.

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As I was on holidays in Germany when guru created this thread, I also was part of the Germanys test message. My phone behaves similar: waking up the phone, but makes nothing more. Without auto suspend I just would wonder myself why my phone is not in suspend anymore. I think it happened a second time for me (while others got it once) - maybe because I didn’t push any button “received message”. I don’t know how it works, but my guess is that smartphones don’t push same message twice, once people react on it.

Since we where on a little sailing ship, there was no alarms other then the spyphones of my friends. So sirens of cities could not reach us. Just a little reminder that there are reasons for such functionalities. However, the worst that can happen in Germany is flooding.

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Nothing here either. Neither on my 'droid. I guess being retired from the system has its priviledges.

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Double take, or maybe “THEY” just don’t want “ME” to take shelter? (Problem solved.)

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Linking the upstream CBS support issue in ModemManager for convenience:

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