Ghost modes—false positives produced by RF demodulators—carry an operational cost.
They waste computational resources, trigger spurious alarms and can mask true signals. In
real-time systems, where performance criteria must be met every cycle[2], ghost hits compete
with latency budgets and true hit rates. This paper quantifies the cost of ghost modes in a
synthetic RF benchmark. We map iso-ghost contours across the SNR–∆f plane, construct cost
curves as a function of a ghost weight λ under a latency cap, and draw a ROC-like utility curve
under varying time budgets. The results reveal hotspots where ghost hits rise sharply, illustrate
how economic preferences drive optimal operating points and provide guidance on policies to
minimise false positives while respecting latency caps.