The problem is, the kinds of problems caused by modification of the radio and a manufacturing mistake can be totally different and so things that you encountered you wouldn't see if someone simply modified it to operate on a different frequency. Therefore, your story which hinges on this difference not existing doesn't hold up.
Actually, if you had reconfigured a device badly and it had ended up signalling incorrectly on a network's control channel as a result, the situation I encountered is exactly what you would have seen on that day. Do you understand what a control channel is and why it is relevant here?
I'm thinking of if the radio had a component failure/missing and the wave it produced was either amplified or modified to be something like a square wave. It would be hard to do the latter with a simple software mod but easy with hardware.
