Part of the "hunt and destroy vs. cost to deploy" equation thread about spread spectrum networks was forwarded to me. How about putting several cheap noise generators on the air as decoys? This might tip the cost balance in favor of the network.
The Julieboard Direct Digital Synthesizer board, which only needs numbers fed to it from a PC printer port or microcontroller output, can be bought wired and tested for $125. Production in volume should be cheaper. So who is hunting down transmitters and killing them, and risking a confrontation with an armed opponent, for this paltry sum?
Decoys would be easy to build, just build a cruddy receiver, tune it to a dead station, add an amplifier, and retransmit the noise at another frequency, and presto, you have a decoy. Incredibly cheap to build, (nothing more than a few transistors, capacitors, and resistors, which don't have to be good quality either); the most expensive thing would probably be the power supply. Since the signals would be encrypted, they wouldn't know static from data (well, they could probably figure it out if they tried, it just depends on how much effort they want to put into it). As for the Julieboard, $125 sounds a bit steep. If we build the boards ourselves, it could be done a lot cheaper. Making rough guesses, we would need: 8088 (or similiar capacity chip): $2-3. Small amount of low-power static RAM (16K or less): $5 eproms: $2-3 UART or something similiar: $2-3 cpu clock, transistors, TTLs, logic gates, other paraphinelia to interface CPU to transmitter: $?? Transmitter and receiver: <$10. (This is USA $$$ btw... also I haven't been following the electronics market too closely lately so correct my guesses if they're wrong.) The only problem is finding people experienced enuff to build the boards.