October 18, 2007: There's been yet another case of
military electronics interfering with civilian communications systems. This
time, the million subscribers to the Israeli Yes Satellite TV system have had
their reception trashed, from time to time, during the last month. It all began
after the September 6th Israeli air raid on a Syrian nuclear weapons facility.
NATO warships, operating off the coast as part of a Lebanon peacekeeping force,
were ordered to move into position to
use their powerful air defense radars to keep an eye on the skies over
Syria. The Dutch frigate De Ruyter had a particularly powerful radar, and that
is believed to be the source of most of the interference with the Yes Satellite
TV signal.
There will be more problems like this, as more
wireless equipment comes into use, and more frequencies are used, more heavily,
by military and civilian operators. It's not a new problem, and was first noted
on a large scale during the 1991 Gulf War. Here, there was a large
concentration of military equipment form all the American military services,
and foreign armed forces as well. There were several unexpected incidents where
frequencies collided in unexpected ways. There was some of this again in 2003
in Iraq. There have been more incidents since, and there will be more, and some
of it will be deadly.
