Warbird Information Exchange

I am curious, there are several products for sale now that interface between your radio and headset that allow you to listen to a MP3 player such as an ipod, and also allow you to connect a cell phone. I know you are not supposed to use an cellphone on an airliner, but what about me when I'm flying around in my Bonanza? Is there any sort of FAR that prohibits this? Old cell phone technology, you couldn't/weren't supposed to use cell phones in flight because it did something to the relay towers, something about the signal using more than 1 tower or some such.
To be able to make a quick call in flight to notify those on the ground of revised ETA's, changes of plan due to weather, etc. etc. would be great but I am wondering if it is allowed? I am not talking about flying arround gabbing the whole time but just making short neccessary calls?

If it's your airplane and you can get a signal, no problem. From what I've heard, getting a signal above 500' is pretty hard. The antennas are orientated so that they provide a specific signal level to all areas within a specific radius of the tower...something around 5 miles or less on average I think, and most towers are less than 150' tall.

With the older systems, once you gained some altitude, you had the propensity to hit multiple towers. The old system would switch between towers when it saw the same phone, looking for the strongest signal. The more towers you hit, the more system and network resources got devoted to determining which signal to use. Consequently, the system would start timing out and dropping other calls and channels on the towers. An easier way to think of it is that it would be like having an infinite loop in a piece of software that hogs more and more cpu time til you have to reboot and stop the loop.


Just for clarification, we no longer have what the FCC considers "cellular service" in the US, though we still call it that.