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Comment by kordlessagain | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many RFIs have been noted to be in the 982Mhz band, especially given we don't know how to transmit at that frequency?

> “We don’t know of any natural way to compress electromagnetic energy into a single bin in frequency” such as this one, Siemion says. [1]

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alien-hunters-dis...

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You might have misread that: we don't know any natural process that would generate a single spectral line at that frequency, but it is very easy to generate artificially by a civilization. Hence, the interest.

You can build an oscillator at that frequency with 10$ in parts.

How many unclassified RFI sources around 982 MHZ is the only question we can answer.

Its in the L-band for satellites up and down by numerous countries and on the ground there's interesting TACAN and military digital links.

Its entirely possible nobody can admit for fifty years that some classified digital data link device had a firmware crash and transmitted an unmodulated carrier for awhile.

Not every country enforces radio spectrum guidelines.

I made some 868Mhz lora sensors for a pacific island client in 2016. The customer had a lot of interference from the local TV station and after talking to the island mayor we just changed them to 877Mhz which was quiet

FCC does. Had to do deconfliction between JTIDS data links (could use more more than X of the available timeslots between all military datalink users) and S-band radar. They’d monitor us and actually occasionally issue fines to units that messed up their terminal’s time slot allocation.

I think that says that we don't know of any naturally occurring sources that would do that, not that we don't know how to generate this signal if we wanted to (which should indeed be trivial).

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