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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Listen up

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I was listening to a presentation the other day on a new spectrum analyser (more of that after its official release date) and as usual there was lots of Powerpoint with examples of how clever the box is at handling complex signal environments. One of these, according to the pitch, showed the RF environment resulting from an installation in a gas (petrol) station. As far as I understood the explanation, the proprietor of the petrol station was so worried about the risk of cellphones setting off a fuel fire at the pumps that he had installed a jammer – presumably, to dissuade customers from using their phones on the premises. (Cue screen shots of mobile phone signals hidden under a blanket of RF mush.)

As I was paying attention to the product itself, it didn’t occur to me until later that there’s quite a few things wrong with this. Of which a couple are; one, it’s illegal, at least, in any jurisdiction I know about. And two, is it not exactly the wrong thing to do to a cellphone if you want to limit the amount of RF energy floating around? I’d have thought that in the presence of an interfering signal, all the mobiles within range would immediately ramp their transmitted power up to maximum, in an attempt to get the BER down. Or do I have that wrong?

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