I had some boards one time, a bunch of clip leads, batteries, and a PIC
programmer.  My laptop bag also happened to test positive for explosives
when they swabed it with the little cotton things that go in the machine.  I
still wound up getting through in a few minutes with no trouble.

We also had one of our techs at work get stopped one time with a home made
piece of test equipment for a marine radar.  It was shipped to us from the
radar maker in Germany and the box and it tested positive for explosives.
He was nearly strip searched and detained for about an hour.

Brian Kraut
Engineering Alternatives, Inc.
www.engalt.com

-----Original Message-----
From: piclist-bounces@mit.edu [mailto:piclist-bounces@mit.edu]On Behalf
Of Nate Duehr
Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2007 6:53 PM
To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
Subject: Re: [OT] Taking PCBs and things as a carry-on


Mike Hord wrote:

> Frankly, in a day and age where illuminated signs depicting a
> space alien flipping the bird can be cause for a city-wide
> shutdown, I'm more than a little nervous about carrying anything
> other than wildly common consumer electronics on an aircraft
> (checked OR carry-on, even).

Why?  What are they going to do to you that has you so fearful?  Delay
you for a few hours and detain you?

(Just asking to see how deep your level of paranoia goes.  Yes, one of
our engineers was strip searched in Tel Aviv once and all he was
carrying was a laptop and his cell phone.  But so-far, at least... one
can still say, "that's just Israel".  Not seeing too many outbreaks of
that level of freak-out here in the States, yet.)

> That said, the tack I would take is simple: show up at least
> three hours early for your flight and be COMPLETELY
> prepared (padded, pre-addressed, pre-paid static safe mailer
> in hand) to send the objects in question back to yourself.

Never a bad idea, I guess... but our company's field engineers travel
with a lot more "strange" stuff than a couple of PCB's in a bag, worth a
lot more money, and have no way to send it all home -- unless they leave
the airport, go to the FedEx counter and ship it.  And guess what...
they could just ship it to wherever they were originally going and have
it delivered to the hotel anyway... and in some cases, the FedEx package
would ride on the exact same aircraft, if they were flying to the boonies.

Seems like common sense would say that having a real business card for
an electronics business in your pocket would go a long way toward not
being overly-harassed, if you have a couple of PCB's in your carry-on.

That and making sure that none of your devices have attractive countdown
timers that count down all the time, with enormous LED segmented
displays, like all the bombs on TV have.  LOL!

Nate
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