Having just had a brief read of the report, I think that this represents an excellent start to a full investigation. The boundaries of this particular report are narrow for practical measurement reasons and I feel that they have only really scratched the surface insofar as.......
1. Only a single frequency per band was used for each measurement. In reality many frequencies are used in each band in mobile communications and the affect of changing the frequency can be marked and dependant on the unintentional "Q" of the reception mechanism within the avionics. This means how easy the system will respond to an interfering frequency and how accurate the accidental tuning has to be. The higher the "Q" the lower the "chances" of interferences, but when the tuning is on target the worse the interference possibilities.
2. Only single frequency simplex has been simulated and in real life half or full duplex possibilities are involved.
3. Only circuit switching on single timeslot transmission has been simulated. Present and future communications protocols are/will be using multi-slot and packet switching techniques.
4. The field strengths do represent that which would be expected at 30cm from the source, but this level of field strength increases remarkably as the source is brought closer to the victim (i.e. the phone is brought closer to the avionics). This can be as a square or cube law relationship depending on the distance and the interfering frequency and the interfering mechanism either low impedance current flowing through the cable or high impedance voltage presented across two points in the control circuits presenting an interfering potential difference
3. Lastly and probably most importantly is that the measurements have been necessarily restricted to Gaussian Min Shift Keying (i.e. GSM). There are other widely used schemes in different areas of the world.
Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) - US
Wide Band Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA/3G/UTRA/CDMA2000)
TDMA - Time Division Multiple Access - US
AMPS - US
DAMPS - US
TACS - South America/China/Middle East etc
PDC - Japan
Again probably boring and techy
BUT my point is that even with the sub-set of possible interferences mechanisms that this report has focused on the measurements and the report still give supporting evidence of interference effects.......I wonder what happens in the real world!
In summary, IMHO we should keep mobile phones switched off during all phases of flight as there are currently too many unknowns and variables to make a proper scientific judgement
Cheers Andy
