Don't buttume. Read the relevant ICAO documents. They are quite explicit about why.
Lurkers? You mean like other people queueing? Yes; that's suspicious activity.
The 10cm range is the *nominal* operating range for the reader. Your insistance that the radiation from the reading process will be undetectable at several metres doesn't make physical sense. "Leakage" is pervasive.
There are devices that'll detect electronic watches at a distance of 10s of metres and more. Radioastronomers won't let your digital watch near their telescopes because they'll interfere with the signals to which they're trying to listen; even with you on the "wrong" side of a 30+ metre dish with godknowswhat dBi gain on the main lobe.
Voyager 1 and 2 are about 100 AU (more than 10 light-hours) from us; VGR2 still being tracked and controlled from Earth. In part that's due to DSS-34 and DSS-45 at Tidbinbilla. The big antenna; DSS-43 is getting a new bearing. It takes only about 20kW to get a signal to VGR2. And VGR2 doesn't have an awful lot of watts of transmitter to return data. But it does manage to communicate for about 16 hours a day.
You said something like "cannot" earlier on... -- "Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia ASCII ribbon campaign Economist E*con"o*mist-, n. X against HTML mail One with a ready explanation as to why and postings his last prediction was so wrong
