I was traveling by air to Atlanta--- at the AP I asked that they not put the PDA (Zire 71) through the Xray.. They insisted--- and the device was errratic for a day--- on the way back I made the same request-- and it was denied This time it was erratic for close to a week. I had to hard re-boot to get it to function.
I was told this should not happen by the Palm people. I have had this problem before with Palm items. I thought that the device being in a metal case might create the problem.
ANYBODY HAVE ANY THOUGHTS ON THIS.
PS My former IT guy says that the Xray will cook the chip-- in any device
I have been traveling thru airports constantly (especially ATL since that is where I live) for 25 years and have put every device imaginable thru Xray, including over a dozen laptops, Palm devices, PPC device, Palm Smartphones, PPC Smartphone, very dumb cell phone and now a Symbian smart phone. I have never once had a problem.
Although I have not done a controlled study involving multiple trials, statistics, etc., I have demonstrated to my satisfaction (based on at least 6 trials) that airport Xrays CAN cause some digital electronic devices to end up with corrupted memory. The device that I've witness the most evidence for was a 1Mb SRAM card (CMOS with a backup battery). EVERYTIME I put that thing through an airport Xray, its contents got scrambled. At least 6 different airports.
However, this is a very rare occurence, maybe only 5% of the devices I have carried through airports had a problem like this, maybe just 2%. MOST devices are perfectly fine. But it seems that some devices are indeed susceptible to Xray damage or scrambling.
It is not unreasonable that radiation would cause memory corruption. There is a large literature on alpha radiation causing memory errors hence the need for ECC memory for mission-critical computers. I don't know about gamma.
I recently took a trip through the airport in Thailand. I took my newly purchased (3 months old) Garmin iQue M3 pocket pc with me. The pocket pc was in my carry on bag with my note book compuer and digital camera. Upon arriving at my destination, I tried my iQue M3 and was amazed to see it going into a hard rest boot upon turning it on. All the memory was cleared including my user settings, contacts, everthing wiped clean. I thought it was as a fluke. So I tirelessly reset all my favourite settings etc. On the return flight my pocket pc again went through the xray machine at the airport again. Upon getting home I turned on the my pocket pc and the same thing happened, all memory wiped clean and the unit reset to factory settings. The SD card was unharmed as so my computer and camera. This can not be coincidence again. I'm convinced the xray screwed up my Garmin iQue M3.
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