You are on a property, a long way from the next house. Something goes wrong — a fall, a machine, a fire, a medical turn. You need the neighbours, now, and you need them to know.
A phone is on silent, in the ute, flat, or beside a sleeping person. Which is exactly when this matters.
Farm Alert is a button on the wall. Press it, and a box in each of your neighbours’ houses lights up and makes a noise until somebody attends to it. No app, no account, no notification tray.
Because a phone is a general-purpose device competing for attention with a hundred other things, and every one of its failure modes lands at three in the morning:
A dedicated box has one job and no other reason to exist. It cannot be silenced by accident, it is not competing with anything, and you can test it by pressing the button.
Deliberately the same thinking as RS1: as few parts as possible, no dependence on infrastructure that is not there, and nothing that stops working because a subscription lapsed.
This alerts your neighbours. It is not a replacement for calling 000, and it never should be. It is for the gap between dialling triple zero and an ambulance finding a gate forty minutes up a dirt road — the neighbour who can be there in four minutes, open the gate, and start helping.
Nothing has been built. No hardware has been chosen, no radio link tested, no group of neighbours asked whether they would even want it. This page exists because the idea is worth writing down, not because there is anything to sell.
What would move it along is talking to people who actually live like this. If you are on a property and have thought “I wish I could just tell the neighbours” — or if you tried something similar and it did not work — I would like to hear about it.
Genuinely. It is easier to hear now than after building three of them.
ian@iangilchrist.net