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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pheilman_ who wrote (5609)	1/3/2003 11:01:02 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 12231

Paul, aren't the cellphone tower antennae aimed more or less horizontally? A cellphone a kilometre above a base station would be invisible to the base station [I guess]. For a start, the signal would have to drill through the aluminium shell, then be received by a badly aligned aerial. Should cellphone use be banned on mountains in the vicinity of cities for the same reason? <I was amazed the Motorola phone with service by Verizon (CDMA) was able to get in the net while we were descending over San Jose, about 25 miles out, several thousand feet in altitude and 200 MPH (?) > Pretty cool eh, breaching the laws of physics like that! I guess airlines are happy with people using Globalstar phones, since they link to satellites and the argument about spectrum pollution doesn't apply. Wacky Wireless would fix cavities, because more people could afford dental treatment if they didn't have to waste so much money on communications. Also, they'd get cyberspace online and would be able to get information from Google while in the supermarket on the cavity-causing propensity of products they are considering. Okay, there is more spectrum consumed by CDMA phones in the sky, due to the ratio of distances to various base stations being more equal until at a height of a million kilometres they are all equidistant [give or take a few wavelengths]. Or near enough to equidistant at a height of 10km. But because of the directional nature of base station antennae, none of them would see the handset anyway. The value of making calls from aircraft far exceeds the value of the extra spectrum they consume. With gpsOne, the handset could be identified as being at a greater altitude than, say, 500 metres and the Wacky Wireless system could bill them accordingly, warning them beforehand that they are in a high cost area. That Wacky Wireless sure is a miracle worker, life saver and life enhancer. Mqurice