[RFI] cellphones on airplanes

[Michael Neverdosky]

Remember the troubles the Army had with one of their fancy new
helicopters that had a habit of crashing or having weird electronic
problems if they went near a microwave tower?

And that was in a MILITARY AC that is supposed to be designed to
operate in a high RF environment.

Don't think for one second that civil AC are going to even get as much
attention to EMI resistance.

Systems can be made to handle lots of signals but it requires careful
design, construction, maintenance and testing. It is just far easier
to make everyone turn everything off.
On top of that, they may be thinking, "If we can blame a passenger for
a crash our liability will be lower."

Lots of places for signals to interfere besides at the operating frequency.

michael N6CHV

On 3/2/06, Jim Jarvis <jimjarvis at verizon.net> wrote:

>
> My first inclination is to say, "horse-hockey".
> But the reality is that the GPS bands and cdma/tdma phone bands
> aren't all that far apart...there could be a question of
> fundamental overload, if enough cellphones were transmitting at
> high power.
>