Airline Travel

It won't hurt them. I travel regularly with expensive radio gear and test equipment that goes through the screening process nearly everytime. Whether or not you choose to hand carry them or not, they still get x-rayed. I usually hand carry my models when I find a new one that I can't live without.

Don.

I have been advised by the airlines that the newer x-ray equipment can POTENTIALLY affect microelectronics and you are advised to have cell phones and laptops hand checked.

I made the mistake of asking them to hand check my laptop, rather than sending it through the xray machine. They took the laptop and swabbed it about 14 times in all different places to make sure it didn't have any explosive residue. The process took about 15 minutes. It's not like the old days when they just asked you to open it up and turn it on.

I later found out that the xray machine at the gate will most likely not harm any electronics. However the xray machines that scan luggage are 10 times more powerful and have been told that they can screw up laptops and such. However not all airports have the high powered luggage scanners in place yet so you take a chance if you leave any electronics in your suit case.

At the worst it might wipe the trannies memory. And any other gear with EEPROM. SIM cards, maybe ESC's and the tranny.

Which would mean that you get to your holiday site and you have a non-functional system with no way to make it work. No thanks.

Make sure you pack it in the center of a lot of soft clothing, if you check it; I just got back from a trip to Hawaii and the luggage was absolutely bashed...

No, you can reprogram it.

Not if it erases the operating system and applications.

That's in EPROM, not EEPROM, normally.

High power Xrays are notoriously uncaring as to what the device is. Hardware destined for space use have all kinds of shielding and radhard features added to them just because of that. Xray, cosmic rays and a whole host of other emf and particles are blocked or attenuated by our atmosphere. Anything CMOS is a problem.