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The Incredible Shrinking Antenna
pinkUZI writes "NYTimes ran an article yesterday about a new material, created by a general manager at Integral Technologies, that would enable use of the plastic mold of a cell phone as its Antenna. Pretty neat, as it actually increases the size of the antenna while decreasing the footprint."
My Nokia 3330 (and I believe most nokias) already doesn't have an external antenna, so what's the big deal? Perhaps the antenna would effectivly be larger but again, I don't see a great deal of point in that, it's very rare that I get less than about 75% signal strength already, and there's more cells going up all the time.
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And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
The Nokia 3360's and smaller phones are very annoying. I want a phone large enough that I dont feel like I need to be moving the phone up to my ear when listening and down to the mouth when talking.
I know they work well, but I feel like I have to do that, and the smaller they get the worst that 'feeling' will be.
--
Todd
Am I the only person who doesn't particularly like the idea of "a very effective radiator" next to my head part of the time, and next to my balls the rest of the time?
Then you had better stay away from table lamps - they're far more effective at spewing radiation than your cellphone
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
My manager designed antenna assemblies for the space shuttle. He also designed parts of the Mariner system for the Venus landings. He wrote code for computer systems that are designed to reboot themselves every 30 milliseconds. You try coding under that kind of constraint.
The president of the company did spooky work on spy satellites. He still won't talk about it. But man, that guy hates Communists with a passion...
And both of them could code circles around 99% of the people on Slashdot. Just because a person becomes a manager doesn't mean he becomes an idiot.
First off, it radiates radio waves, as you seem to understand. It doesn't radiate alpha particles or gamma rays or any such fission by-products. It's radiation, but not nearly as bad as the name implies to some.
Some persons believe the EM radiation given off by cell phones is a hazard to your health; I actually tend to agree. The problem is, you can't make it less of an issue by using a crappy antenna. If the antenna is worse, you just generate a stronger signal to overcome that limitation. The power needed to contact the cell tower remains the same.
So, you will have the same amount of radiation emitted into your brain cave whether or not the phone's antenna is efficient. You might as well just get an efficient antenna and save batter power, instead of holding back the tech out of paranoia.
± 29 dB