I have also heard rumours that the Gov't want to charge the MOD for the use of the EM spectrum and therefore we will have to minimise on the number of frequencies that we use
They only charge for transmitting not for recieving - ie. SIGINT. Plus if we don't transmit within the UK FIR they can't charge anyway!
The interesting thing about SIGINT birds (like R1 and RJ) is that they rely on getting the info back to other govt agencies for analysis, granted there are real time jobs to do as well but I would estimate that 50% of the work is done off-board of the manned asset. So the bandwidth issue may not be as bad as you think. I understand that the biggest issue is antenna size, however, they have done clever things with small antennas before by summing up their collect - such as the very large array radio telescope system...
