more on 2 comments on cell phones in the air

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [IP] more on 2 comments on cell phones in the air]
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 17:02:47 -0800
From: John Markoff <jmarkoff () gmail com>
Reply-To: markoff () nytimes com
To: dave () farber net
References: <440CCD02.9060409 () farber net>

Hi Dave,

Just a bit of historical background on the commercial aircraft radio
interference issue. I think I wrote about this issue for the first
time in InfoWorld in 1982. Or was it 1983? I wrote the article, which
was titled "Unsafe at Any Altitude?" or something like that, after
reading a letter to the editor in Byte Magazine from a concerned
pilot.

As I recall, the Osborne I had recently been introduced (it fit under
an airline seat, more or less, and with some risk, you could put it on
the seat tray and use it in flight). The one bit of reporting I
remember is that I found a Tandem radio interference engineer who had
looked at a running Osborne with some kind of RF spectrum analyzer and
had found alarming spikes at various final approach frequencies. The
details have long since escaped me, but it made for interesting
reporting at the time.

best,

John Markoff
New York Times

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