Originally Posted by
stimpy
Huh? I think you may want to rethink that.
First you say that poor shielding can affect cockpit communications, then you say that a pico cell fixes that? Nothing fixes poor shielding. In fact, a poorly shielded laptop PC will have WAY more affect on cockpit instruments than any mobile phone.
And mobile phones use mobile phone frequencies. Not satellite frequencies. The pico cell system is connected to a satellite transmission system. But the phones themselves are just ordinary phones.
You may want to re read that then. What I said was that an on board pico cell doesn't try and communicate with the outside world through the mobile phone frequencies, it uses satellites. This means that onboard phones are not trying to TX at full power to reach a cell tower on the ground. in fact they use minimal power when connecting to a cell tower (pico cell) within feet of them. I never said that pico cell doesn't use mobile phone frequencies, obvioulsy they do or they would be useless for communication with mobile phones. I've been on flights (especially on 9K with their smaller 10 seat planes on ACK) where before take off the captain has turned round and asked everyone to check their phones are off as he can hear interference from at least one of them in his headset. My BlackBerry can affect the sound on my Tv from 15 feet away when it is receiving an email, I now usually leave the berry in the other room since I worked out that was what was causing it.
I only ever mentioned instruments to say
it might not cause the instruments to go haywire and the plane to violently lose altitude but it wouldn't be great if your pilot can't hear the instruction to drop down a thousand feet or two to avoid another plane.
I personally would rather not be on a plane where there are 300 mobile devices all trying to connect at full power to a cell tower they can't reach, possibly b*ggering up comms with the ground.
I used to work in a building where mobile phones (in fact anything with a transmitter) were banned from certain areas because in part of the noise effect that they caused through the speakers. I was pedantic about this with visitors who thought it was a joke when they first saw the signs saying they had to turn them off before proceeding. I told one person (who turned out to be quite important) that even sticking their phone where the sun refuses to shine wasn't good enough unless it was off (or in flight mode).