Quote:
Originally Posted by BWinmill
Detecting radio signals is trivial. Pinpointing those signals is the real issue. At best they could use a directional antenna, which would let them know roughly what direction the signal is coming from. Even then I'm not sure that it would work well because large chunks of metal (e.g. the airplane body) tends to distort those signals. Do a search on antenna patterns and ground plane to get a rough idea of what I'm talking about.
I'm guessing that the radio transmitter, and perhaps receivers, are the only aspects that they are worried about. Electronics do tend to spit out a lot of radio noise, even if they don't have a radio transmitter, but that should be relatively low power (especially for portable devices). Again, I'm not an expert in this field so I cannot be certain, but I do have a background in physics. If you are interested in this sort of thing, you can get an introduction to how electricity and the electromagnetic spectrum works by looking at a grade 12 physics textbook. There is also a lot of accessible materials produced for radio amateurs which will give you a grounding in what's happening.
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frankly, i think it would be worthwhile to have some form of detector that measures if there are active signals beyond a certain threshold. I mean we're already walking, driving and flying through a soup of electromagnetic radiation, so it's primarily a matter of degrees.
I heard a funny story (that may be apocryphal since I'm not sure the technology is in place for it) about a pilot announcing, before pushback, that someone still had a cellphone on and that they wouldn't leave until it was turned off. After several announcements and much double checking by passengers, he announced sheepishly that he had found the culprit phone, and it was his.
I recall in the 60s and 70s there was a big to do about using FM receivers in aircraft because they caused interference with the navigation. Heck, i remember them using it in one of those mystery movie specials where it was used by villain as an attempt to kill some David Cassidy-esque pop star by having his plane lost crossing the Atlantic.
