In Europe there is an organization called EURASIP which is the European Association for Signal Processing. Everything about modern electronics, computers, telecommunications is built on foundations of signal processing. There is physics and maths involved, there is hardware and software.
In this organization there are Special Area Team or (SAT) for short. Each SAT deals with a specific subset. Is it possible that Q’s clue about SAT relay of mobile phone signals to end users was talking about this organization?
https:// www.eurasip.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=144&Itemid=1144
I looked for deaths of scientists associated with EURASIP and I found one who was described as a giant in his field. Alfred Fettweiss died in Bochum Germany in 2015 at age 88. That may seem old, but Germans tend to live active healthy lifestyles and I know many that live well into their 90s. Look at his photo on the second URL that I give below. He does not look anywhere near death. I searched in English looking for cause of death and found nothing. I searched in German using Todesursache and found nothing except that heart attack is the major cause in Germany. So this may be a red herring.
But read through this description. He seemed to be working on very advanced groundbreaking stuff and he commented that the Germans met significant resistance from American colleagues to try this stuff. They attributed it to NIH, but this sounds so advanced that it may have clown connections.
http:// ethw.org/Oral-History:Alfred_Fettweis
This has been an interesting dig so far because I get the sense that there is an awful lot of work being done. In a climate where a few large multinationals monopolize each industry, I can see how this all gets suppressed. If we can remove those barriers I expect to see a great leap forward kind of like what Putin has gotten through his innovation centres and the special activity programs for young technologists.