I'm tryint to speed-read all this excellent information, and I still don't
think I have an answer to my question:

By leaving my phone switched on, but *not making an outgoing call*, am I
doing no harm, or negligible harm, to the system?

Assume also that nobody calls me.

-- David Brooks

"G.R. Patterson III" wrote in message
...


Greg Copeland wrote:

The general theory on modern cell phones in flight, goes like this:
The FCC also has a ban because when you're in flight, you're always at
least 6-8 miles away from the nearest cell tower. You end up
communicating
with too many towers and bogging down the network.

No, you could be right beside the nearest tower. In general, any tower
within about
20 miles of you will be able to receive you when you're on the ground
(unless
something's blocking the signal). To eliminate conflict between calls,
towers that
are neighbors use different frequency sets. When you make a call, the
control system
polls all of the towers that can "hear" you and tells the closest one to
accept the
call. That tower tells your phone what frequency pair to use. After that,
only that
tower can "hear" your phone. If you move too far away, the control system
will poll
all the towers again and have your phone switch frequencies.

Unfortunately, there aren't enough radio frequencies to allow every tower
to use a
unique set, so there will probably be several towers between 30 and 60
miles from you
that use the same set of frequencies that your phone is using. They can't
hear you
'cause they're too far away.

Now take off. As soon as you get 500' up, some of these towers can hear
your phone.
If these towers are using the same frequency pair for other calls that
your phone is
using, your call will bleed into those conversations. Some hardware
systems can
detect conflicts like this and have other phones change frequencies. This
hardware,
however, will log the ID of the phone that's causing the trouble, and you
may get a
service termination notice.

The system designers carefully design the network to prevent call conflict
due to
things like skyscrapers. Skyscrapers rarely move, however.

George Patterson
This marriage is off to a shaky start. The groom just asked the band
to
play "Your cheatin' heart", and the bride just requested "Don't come
home
a'drinkin' with lovin' on your mind".