We all know the procedure. Warning signs, “The use of mobile phones is strictly prohibted during your entire stay onboard!”-speaches, the threat of prosecution. The official reasoning is that cellphones could interfere with the aircrafts electronics and risk a breakdown of navigation or communication equipment. Given the other sources of intereference on board and the general construction of modern aircraft (all controls go over fibreglas cables that are immune to radio interference), this seemed like a rahter paranoid measure. Indeed, if you study experiments closely where they actively tried to achieve interference in a commercial aircraft, the concusion is that it is in theory possible. But only if the pilot itself directly holds the phone transmitting at peak power very near to the instruments.

So, the popular theory was that the GSM networks itself requested the ban, in order to avoid network confusion from phones seeing to many cells at once from the great altitude. But on closer inspection this also proves to be nonsense. The networks handover strategy could be easily adapted to that risk, and in fact it apparently has already been implemented. Using a GSM cellphone at the normal speed and altitude does not produce any meaningfull results anyway, except during takeoff and landing. Everybody who has traveled with a small private airplane will also know that the pilots routinely use GSM cellphones to advise their landing times to their target airstrip by SMS, as those tend to work best (and, oh wonder, they dont fall down while doing that!)

Now I had recently a couple of beers with someone seems to be really in the know. And what he told me sounds rather logical. The real reason GSM got banned in airplanes are flashing mobile phone antennas. Yes. These blinkety things that were modern some years ago and are still chick in some parts of the world. The physics works as follows: the LED(s) is a semiconductor, a diode to be precise. it is positioned very near to the antenna and gets a lot of radio energy through its own little antenna, enough that it starts to light up and blink. Now by the magic of radio physics, part of that energy gets re-radiated, but on a different frequency, determined by size, shape and position of the antennas to eachother and the characteristics of the LED. Unfortunatelly the re-radiation happens in the frequency range of the aircrafts navigation and ground communication radios, effectively creating the risk of a jamming signal. Now the engineers said “lets ban flashing antennas on aircraft”, but the security folks new they would never ever be able to enforce it. So they banned the use of GSM mobiles altogether…

I will try to confirm this story with own measurements, as soon as I get my hands on a spectrum analyzer. Could be a while, but I wont forget it.

I know I have neglected my valued blog readers for quite some time.
I had something to say about people who rent out holiday homes in winter without providing adequate heating (and then refuse to give a discount, offering verbal insults instead). But I was to annoyed to vent my anger at length in text. I hope google finds this comment and some people are warned. Don’t go there in winter, and if you can, also don’t go in summer. This kind of attitude deserves to be punished.

I also had something to comment about the visit to the Cargolifter Tropical Island simulation , but plenty of friends did it already. Just one thought: they should have done it in a Space-Theme, instead of a fake-brazil style. Oh, and a little piece: the narrator of the fake native dance show, that should picture the history of Brazil, completely derailed any and all hope of quality by beginning his text with the sentence: “The natives of Brazil practiced the superstition of witchcraft”. It doesn’t take an degree in ethnology or religion studies to recognize how stupid and utterly ignorant this is. But it fitted the overall simulation effect…

German and international politics is no fun either, but that is nothing new. And of course I could bore you with how much I dislike the Berlin winter. But instead, lets jump to an equally frustrating topic.

There is apparently no adequate e-book device on the market . Yes, I said it. The end of the eBook-hype 2002 left us without anything that could be considered an acceptable portable reading device for my daily public transport rides.
The minimum requirement would of course the ability to read PDF files. I also would like them to be searchable and I want a cheap storage medium, like CompactFlash. Why is there no market for this? I cant be the only person who is sick lugging around all these tomes of non-indexed paper.

My preliminary research came up with two major reasons, and they all relate to fucked up business plans.
First, the artificial restriction of content on most devices prevented a thriving and living ebook pirate scene. With all these complicated Digital Rights Management schemes, specialized download software requirements and the strong desire to make money by selling electronic books without a common interoperable standard, there was simply no room for the number of companies that tried to enter the market. Also, by not supporting the only format that remotely resembles a standard – PDF – the manufacturers choose to go the proprietary way of becoming extinct.

Second, the price of most devices was outrageous. Why should I spend the same amount of money on a eBook that it costs to buy a laptop?

Anyway, now there is a uncaptured but severely burned market for someone adventurous to step into. Get the latest display technology, the stuff that is marketed as “digital paper” or some OLED variant (greyscale is just fine), slap an ARM processor with USB and ethernet below it, put in a SD or CompactFlash slot and sell the thing for at most $250. If that means that it has to come without builtin LiON battery, but lives of normal AA NiMH cells, so be it. Market it to students, academics, government bureocrats and lawyers and make sure all the BookWarez addicts know and feel very very welcome. Include the capability to print, put in a webbrowser to directly download the fresh books from the net and, if there is room in the budget, put in a second SD slot for WLAN. And by all means, leave any and all DRM crap out of it (it just raises cost and makes things difficult). Make it an totally open platform, encourage software development. Choose a well established operating system that has already a good PDF/RTF/Word reader (which narrows it down to Linux and PocketPC). I have plenty of ideas how to establish a working commercial library concept based on such a device, but I doubt anyone has the balls to do it in the next years. Maybe Apple could do it…