Power of a 'microcell' base station in an overhead drop ceiling?

We have a rack of TV modulators and ATSC receivers for our SMATV system, that started to act up after Cingular upgraded the power and antenna arrays on our roof above the rack. We had to relocate the rack and recable, which they paid for.

It's a lot of power at 2.4 ghz!

GSM cellular systems are notorious for spitting out RF that is easily picked up by audio components. Usually its a short 2 or 3 second burst of what might sound to a laymen as high speed Morse code (as opposed to to white noise or the screech of a telephone modem you hear when while making a dial up connection) perhaps once every few hours.

It comes over my laptop's speakers if my phone is within an inch of the laptop, within a foot of my radio alarm clock on the night table, within two feet of my desktop computer's external speakers' amplifier.

The micro-cell may be putting out higher power and longer duration and more often data bursts.

Not likely a cold solder joint per se that functions as a demodulator for a nearby AM broadcast band transmitter, but could be along the lines of "miscellaneous metallic junction intermodulation" (a common phrase used in the two-way communications industry) which *does* affect FM two-way radio communication systems.

I don't know the rules at 2.4GHz, but, unless you are in what is called the "blanketing zone", they paid for that out of good will. It sounds like you are probably within the zone.

In most cases, where out of band rf gets into unlicensed equipment it is considered the fault of the unlicensed equipment. This is usually true, since such equipment is very seldom shielded to withstand anything near the allowable rf field.