You can buy anonymous 'pay-as-you-go' cellphones for minor amounts of money?
I had to fill out forms with my life story before I could take my new P-A-Y-G home!
"all our PDA's and laptops with 802.11b are always on, blasting 2.4 GHz signals all across the pacific, and no-one cares" : As a private pilot, I often use WLAN to beam the navigation data to the passengers in the back (like that cool little Route Map thing on many newer commercial airliners). As it's only 10mW output power, the signal will barely reach the aircraft's radio equipment. Cellphones, on the other hand, can output up to 2.2W of RF power, which will still be many, many times stronger than the signals from GPS satellites and ground navigation beacons. If you're lucky, the phone signal will blank out the navigation instruments. If you're not, as happened to a friend of mine when he left his phone on during a private flight, the instruments will misread, which could have pretty nasty consequences.
He also had a letter from his cellphone company complaining that he had tied up several ground stations as he was in the signal range of all of them at once during his trip. Oops!
Flash memory and most solid state media should be fine, but despite the notices on the scanners to the contrary, I would be cautious about putting floppy disks through the X-ray machine. I have made many flights with almost new floppy disks, and always ended up with bad sectors on a number of them after going through the scanner. This stopped after I put them in the plastic tray and insisted that they were not X-rayed. Not that anyone uses floppies now anyway...
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You can buy anonymous 'pay-as-you-go' cellphones for minor amounts of money? I had to fill out forms with my life story before I could take my new P-A-Y-G home!
"all our PDA's and laptops with 802.11b are always on, blasting 2.4 GHz signals all across the pacific, and no-one cares" : As a private pilot, I often use WLAN to beam the navigation data to the passengers in the back (like that cool little Route Map thing on many newer commercial airliners). As it's only 10mW output power, the signal will barely reach the aircraft's radio equipment. Cellphones, on the other hand, can output up to 2.2W of RF power, which will still be many, many times stronger than the signals from GPS satellites and ground navigation beacons. If you're lucky, the phone signal will blank out the navigation instruments. If you're not, as happened to a friend of mine when he left his phone on during a private flight, the instruments will misread, which could have pretty nasty consequences. He also had a letter from his cellphone company complaining that he had tied up several ground stations as he was in the signal range of all of them at once during his trip. Oops!
Flash memory and most solid state media should be fine, but despite the notices on the scanners to the contrary, I would be cautious about putting floppy disks through the X-ray machine. I have made many flights with almost new floppy disks, and always ended up with bad sectors on a number of them after going through the scanner. This stopped after I put them in the plastic tray and insisted that they were not X-rayed. Not that anyone uses floppies now anyway...