Ever seen some of those videos of mobile phones frying popcorn? Mick posted some a few days ago and my wife and I thought we could use a snack while we watched a movie last night.

We tried to "cook" a small number of popcorn kernels using two Sony Eriksson K610i's, a connected Bluetooth headset, and an old Motorola E386 (similar setup to that in the videos from Mick). The K610's have a SAR rating of 1.01 (as reported on the SAR Shield web site)

The result...we went hungry. And we did leave the calls open for a minute or two, stopped and started calls, even sent picture messages from one handset to the next. I don't think they emit nearly enough RF to pop the kernels. It takes the microwave (895W) a few minutes to do the job, we would have to have the phones (~0.7W) in talk/data mode for over a day to get close to that amount.

20 minutes wasted. Luckily we have one of those mobile plans were we get free calls between our phones.

That got me thinking....we need more power.

So I hooked up three UHF long range RFID antennas and placed some rather nervous looking kernels in the middle. At 2W each, it still would of taken around 5 hours to get some popcorn. These puppies can read tags at 10m (even through walls as I discovered) but excite a popcorn kernel, they can not...we need more power.

What I need is one of those "lasers"

Who wants steak!