"Robert Baer" wrote in message
...
Ed Price wrote:

"Watson A.Name - "Watt Sun, the Dark Remover""
wrote
in message ...

"Some Guy" wrote in message
...
What a load of horse ****.

You guys are acting as if the engines and flight control surfaces
of
an aircraft are intimately tied to the plane's radio receiver,
and the
slightest odd or out-of-place signal that it receives is enough
to
send any plane into a tail spin.

No, the laws say that you can be arrested for breaking them, and
one way
to break them is to use a FM radio while the aircraft is flying.

All this while the air travel industry is considering allowing
passengers to use their own cell phones WHILE THE PLANES ARE IN
FLIGHT
by adding cell-phone relay stations to the planes and allowing
any
such calls to be completed via satellite. So I guess the feeble
radiation by my FM radio (powered by 2 AAA batteries) is enough
to
cause a plane to dive into the ocean, but the guy next to me
putting
out 3 watts of near-microwave energy is totally safe.

You don't know what you're talking about. With the attitudes of
the air
marshals nowadays, making airliners turn around and go back to
their
departure point just because a passenger is unruly, there is a
high
probability that one of them is flying along on your flight, and
if he
sees an earphone hanging out of your ear, you might be that unruly
passenger they arrest at the departure point. Especially with
your
nasty attitude!

What about my hand-held GPS unit? Any chance me using it (during
all
phases of a flight, which I do routinely) will result in a
one-way
ticket to kingdom come?

Geez, what a TWERP! You can't add two and two without jumping to
conclusions! A rational conversation with you is nearly
impossible.

Getting back to the original question (poor to non-existant AM
reception), I understand the idea of aperature and long
wavelenths of
AM radio and the size of airplane windows - but what about the
effect
of ALL the windows on a plane? Don't they create a much larger
effective apperature when you consider all of them? And since
the
plane isin't grounded, isin't the exterior shell of a plane
essentially transparent to all RF (ie it's just a re-radiator)
because
it's not at ground potential?

You're even dumber than I had thought. Look up Faraday Shield.
Here, try this:
http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae176.cfm
You don't have to worry about a ground for it to work. Duh.


He's not dumber than "I" thought!

Ed
wb6wsn

"Faraday shield" to some degree is a myth.

You use weasel words like 'to some degree' to avoid talking about the
truth. Radio waves don't go thru a sheet of metal.

I have seen radars inside quonset huts track a *bird* flying a few
miles away (thru the metal wall)!

No, not thru a metal wall. I saw the radar go thru the wooden walls of
the bldg when I was in radar repair school in the army. But that was
wood. Your so-called metal quonset hut was probably wood or fiberglass.

If you saw anything, it was probably your own reflection off the metal
walls, IF it didn't fry you like a porkchop in a microwave oven!