FOR most of us, TV interference means nothing worse than a few blips on the screen. But for the US Air Force it has become a billion-dollar problem. That鈥檚 because the USAF鈥檚 flagship aircraft, the stealth bomber, could soon be announcing its supposedly secret arrival in war zones on ordinary TV sets.
According to the military journal Jane鈥檚 Defence Weekly, the radar systems on board the USAF鈥檚 B-2 stealth bombers will interfere with satellite-based communications services that are being planned for the end of the decade. The bombers鈥� radar signals are so powerful they could even fry civilian electronics.
The problem centres on the 鈥淜u-band鈥� frequencies, which stretch from 12 to 18 gigahertz. Communications and TV satellites have until now only beamed signals down to Earth at frequencies between 10 and 13 gigahertz, leaving the upper reaches free for radar. So the first stealth bombers, in the early 1980s, used radar in some of the empty Ku-band frequencies.
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But the ever-increasing numbers of communications and TV satellites are rapidly eating up spare frequencies between 10 and 13 gigahertz. So the International Telecommunications Union is now allocating them higher Ku-band frequencies.
For obvious reasons, the Pentagon does not publish the Ku-band frequencies it uses. But it has admitted that after 2007 there will be a clash between the transmitters on the stealth bomber and new commercial satellite services. It鈥檚 about as un-stealthy as an aircraft could be.
The USAF has two fixes to choose from. It can change the frequency of its radar, which risks making it less accurate. Or it can replace the plane鈥檚 radar antennas with steerable ones that can be pointed away from population centres. Jane鈥檚 Defence Weekly says either option will take ten years to implement and cost at least $1 billion.