Thread: Nokia C5 stuffed?????

The boss rang me on my work phone(Nokia C5) this afternoon during a thunderstorm,the lightening was VERY close.I was in the grader and I could feel the hairs on my arms raising during the strikes.
Anyhow the call got cut off,I just guessed the boss hung up.Went to call him 10 mins later and the phone was dead.It wont turn on even plugged into a charger.I swapped batteries with my Nokia C5 the workphone battery is good.
Does lightening kill mobile phones????
Andrew

Originally Posted by LandyAndy

The boss rang me on my work phone(Nokia C5) this afternoon during a thunderstorm,the lightening was VERY close.I was in the grader and I could feel the hairs on my arms raising during the strikes.
Anyhow the call got cut off,I just guessed the boss hung up.Went to call him 10 mins later and the phone was dead.It wont turn on even plugged into a charger.I swapped batteries with my Nokia C5 the workphone battery is good.
Does lightening kill mobile phones????
Andrew

yes. in just the right circumstances lightning kills everything.

spiral wound thumbnail or stamp antennae are very very good at taking tiny tiny deviations in the radio spectrum and turning them into signals. your phone could have between 2 and 6 of these. care to guess how many orders of magnitude a lightning strikes energy is over "tiny tiny"? (lots and lots or many many would be the technical level of answer I'm aiming for)

while thats overly simplified metal cased and metal framed phones are less prone to it being a problem where as plastic case phones with multilayer designs in them with foil shielding over the processors will be more prone to failure.

you dont even need to have the phone on, or a hit the magnitude of a lightning strike to cause failure, just something that will induce more than about 10V potential between 2 parts of the phone that would normally sit at about 0v potential when the phones got humid air inside of it (and if its been in your pocket for more than an hour most likely it has) because at that point your mobile phone is not much more than a very big, execedingly ineffecient capacitor looking for a, a charge and b, somewhere to dump it.

Its the same concept as static discharge wiping out laptops and desk tops when unsuspecting owners plug in USB stuff without grounding to the casing first normally it just takes out the USB protection which resets when you reboot but occasionally it goes all the way to wiping out more important stuff. again, the orders of magnitude between a static discharge of a person shuffling on carpet compared to a lighting stike... lots.

I cant remember where but I recall that enough static charge to make your hair start to stand on end is around 500v, and could be as high as 2500v. The vandegraph generator from scitec I recall being able to raise over 100Kv (but bugger all amps) in between sparks

heres a fun link
http://amasci.com/emotor/voltmeas.html#volt1