> Actually, amazingly enough, one of my certifiable friends is so
> confident in the safety of gasoline that he actually extinguished
> his cigarette in it!  I've seen it done, and in disbelief, no
> explosion, and no flame.  So if the heat of the cigarette is not
> hot enough to ignite gasoline, would the spark from a dropped cell
> phone?

Assuming there was a spark, yes. The burning cigarette is not as hot as you
think, and the energy expended in evaporating the gasoline cooled it off.

A steel spark is literally burning steel, which is quite hot.  I used
electrically generated sparks to ignite my butane torch yesterday to grill
some steaks.

I promise the gas pump gods that I will not stand in my gas tank, rapidly
connecting and disconnecting my battery, but I want to know what they are
going to do about the thousands of volts my car accumulates during the
average run.. In fact, since I have to make a run this afternoon, I'm going
to take my ESD meter, and measure the charge built up on my calibrated
standard ford explorer, on this standard fall afternoon in indiana.  Can
someone figure the approximate capacitance to ground of an explorer on 15
inch wheels?

> Our PCB designer designed a board where we integrated a 16C73A with
> some Linx RF modules.  The transmitter module was placed directly
> beside the PIC with the trace to the antenna looping through the PIC
> pins and underneath it.  This was causing some definite problems, and
> would only work properly when we re-routed the antenna trace.

One would sort of expect that. I bet the transmitter didn't live up to your
expectations either!