John Galban wrote:
The old analog 800 Mhz phones (the ones the FCC prohibits in the air)
used to work just fine at cruising altitudes. The downside was that
you lit up every cell within your line of site and ****ed off the phone
company.

....and the dozens of other cell phone users on the ground that had their
call drop because of you.

The newer digital services (operating on frequencies not prohibited
by the FCC for air use)

Urban myth. The table of allocation in Part 1 does not authorize the
frequencies allocated to PCS to be used for air to ground service,
period. These tables are controlling regardless of what your
interpretation of Part 22 may be.

don't seem to work once you get a few thousand
feet AGL. I was talking to a Sprint engineer about it and he told me
that the antenna patterns on the newer cell services are angled
downward in most places, which degrades the signal received in the
aircraft.


True; the down tilts are used to mitigate against inter-cell interference.