Question to all those that know and breath rules and crunch numbers for breakfast.

Everywhere I look it seems to imply that a decker trying to contact his team outside of the Matrix is taking on huge penalties to do so. What would the benefits of a Cybercomm link be. The text indicates that the Cybercomm translates thoughts into signals, so would a dekcer still be getting penalties for taking to his real-world chummers or would it be negated as there isn't really a need to stop focusing on the Matrix.

Thoughs, comments. A better way?


-Wolf

External Transducer, or similar system, attached to deck.

Or a Comlink program.

Well...I believe "speaker" is an optional you can install in a cyberdeck. Just chatter through that.

Or, if you want to be fancy, have an 'agent' work as a cyberdeck secretary, shuttling communications to the rest of the team through whatever means necessary. Commlink to headset radios, cellphones, or the deck's speaker.

"Hello? Is this Mr. Bruno, the Street Samurai? Good. Tron v2.0 told me to tell you, 'Alright, I almost have the encryption key for the site's security hacked and...what's that?...oh, crap, Black IC! AHHHH!!!!!' And then he had nothing more to say, so I took that to be the end of his message."

If you can install a speaker, why can't you just plug in a direct radio/cellular line?

You can. You can plug just about any electronics into an FUP: a tranceiver, a pocket secretary, etc etc. The main reason a Comlink program is so expensive is because of all the other things you can do with it besides placing calls: tracing calls, rerouting calls, etc.

Screw Commlink. Just get another datajack, a transducer, and the same communications gear the rest of the team is using. Route it to your other datajack using one of the free ports. As far as I know, you're still free to communicate via it without any penalty whatsoever.

It's worth noting that, due to the totally irrational way in which the Matrix handles the concept of "location", it's impossible to make a comcall through your deck while decking into a host, and I'm not sure that you can even make the call beforehand and maintain it while you perform the intrusion.