Re: What Happened to Me

>> You know of course that the cell phone system in Europe is different
>> from the US. Here, there are signs at the front door of all hospitals >> (and in many places inside) saying 'Mobile phones MUST be switched >> off'. The idea is that they can interfere with various medical >> equipment. I don't know if that is true, or if it is like the >> prohibition on airplanes -- but in any case, that's the rule. And most >> people follow it.

Compliance in hospitals is dropping off. British hospitals let outside companies set up bedside phones whose rates would scare the corpses in the mortuary (premium rate numbers to call, phone cards to make calls from). Result is widespread use of mobiles.

Immigration in Heathrow has plenty of crossed-out symbols (as if the phones are banned!) but widespread disregard is the norm. And why not.

> Having said that -- my wife is a nurse and in her hospital the staff >> do have cell phones. They are called DECT and apparently they use a >> sub-set of the frequency band that is sure to not conflict with all >> the monitors, analyzers, etc. in the building.

DECT stood for Digital European Cordless Telephones but to spread the technology the E changed to Extensible. Base stations can put out more power than GSM cellphones, the handsets are typically milliwatts. Still possible interference to sensitive gear but a lot less than a GSM phone cranked up. Security people in hospitals can have walky-talkies on far higher power but not spread spectrum like GSM.

Interesting. I recently had to visit my ailing grandmother in the > ntensive care unit of a local hospital. No warnings about cell phones > and in fact saw staff use them.

Away from necessarily-sensitive medical equipment everything else should be hardened to GSM. Especially airplanes but it's not happening soon enough IMHO.

Old anti-spam address cmylod at despammed dot com appears broke So back to cmylod at bigfoot dot com