(Roy Smith) wrote:

Systems designed for aviation use may share some of the basic cell
system ideas (and even some of the physical infrastructure like
towers), but the ground station grid and switching algorithms are
optimized for their intended use.

Of course, so what are we arguing about?...I never did claim that
they're compatible with each other...these special cell phones
are merely special cell phones...they operate just 'like' the
common cell phone in that they allow the 'customer' to move from
'cell' to 'cell' and they switch the customer to the new 'cell'
precisely as the common cell system does except at -longer
intervals- because of the wide cell tower spacing (and certainly
on different channels from the common system).

As you say, these special phones cannot use the standard cell
system because of their generic differences (mostly in range)
etc. BUT...they're cell phones nonetheless simply because they
allow the customer to move from cell to cell...which is the
reason that the word 'cell' was coined in the first place.

It's pretty easy to see the problem...a terrestrial cellphone can
almost never 'get into' more than one cell facility at a time yet
a cell phone on an aircraft can 'see' dozens of them because of
antenna height, thus creating havoc in the system...that's -why-
using the common unit on an aircraft is illegal.
--

-Gord.
(use gordon in email)