As you want to utilize cellular; I would initially fix the weak cellular reception first.
Just found out yesterday; friend that was building a home in CO almost lost his other home there; being stranded and eventually rescued by a helicopter (with 45 minutes notice to pack up his stuff) as literally all the roads from his home to anyplace "washed" away.
This has "cancelled" his new home endeavor (only the road to his new home was built though and he never did break ground as his base price went from around a million to 1.5 million due to the economies of construction over the last few months) and most likely would have washed away anyways. (thus losing some stuff).
BTW friend is around my age. After coming home (to the midwest) he did have a couple of small strokes; probably maybe due to the stress of said endeavor.
I don't listen or read any news and found this out yesterday when he called me.
He doesn't have TV there either; never set it up; so my last visit there showed him how easy it was to set up a small 1 foot satellite dish on a coffee can on his deck to watch TV in 5 minutes (easy to do). There were about 8 of us there and we did get stranded for a time due to a major snowstorm. The weather though was nice and we just carved out a path in the snow drifts (4-5 foot high in his driveway) to play bean bags outside as we did get a bit bored there and wait for the airport to reopen (a few days later).
He did not have any solar set up in his older home; just phone and electricity. He lost them both and initially was told he would be given food and water via the red cross folks for up to 2-3 months. While he does have a cellular phone; its never worked at his house there.
Ideally having solar power and radio (or cellular) connectivity would have helped him a bit as he was very isolated with only 3-4 neighbors and all with no connectivity cellular or radio.
Here wanting to get back into Ham radio purchased one similiar to these; but way cheaper last month...
http://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=H0-007323
