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.