"The original UK radar trials were conducted at Orfordness ....The early tests showed echoes from Europe over 2,000 miles away."
Suffolk having been transplanted for the tests to the east coast of Canada?
I heard this RFI story from an editor friend who ran the newspaper outside the Bremerton Navy Base in the NW US. When the Associated Press began sending photographs via digital satellite instead of land-line fax around 1990, pictures that arrived around 6 a.m. each day were scambled. As an afternoon paper that printed at 10 a.m., this meant some of the best newsy news pictures from the Gulf War I were getting toasted right on deadline.
After a little investigating he discovered that all the big aircraft carriers in port tested their search radars at 6 ack-emma, and that all of them pointed directly at the newspaper's satellite reception dishes (ships lined up in parallel berths facing the town.) The beams were turning the incoming AP signals into guacamole.
That was at a range of about 1 mile or less, though.
That Crikey story at first listen sounds a bit like finding a false bottom in your wastebasket and blaming it for all your mistyped pages - but maybe it will go somewhere.