Russian Woodpecker - The Radio Signal That Wreaked Havoc Around The World

thank you many of you have asked to see my take on the duga radar or what was more commonly known as the Russian woodpecker so here goes during the 1970s large portions of the HF bands were suffering serious cases of interference reportedly caused by a powerful transmitter or transmitters located somewhere in Russia or the Ukraine but first let's go back a bit the Soviet Union had been working on early warning radar for their anti-ballistic missile systems throughout the 1950s and 1960s but most of these were line of sight systems that were really only useful for Rapid analysis and interception only none of these systems had the capability to provide an upper hand in the form of an early warning of a launch within seconds or minutes that would give Soviet defenses time to study the attack and plan a response it was determined that an over the horizon radar array in the USSR would help solve this problem and work began in the late 1960s the name duga is thrown around a bit so we need to break it down the first experimental system with the name duga was built outside the Black Sea port of micoleave in the southern Ukraine this successfully detected rocket launches from baikon or cosmodrome 1600 miles away then the experimental system was followed by the Prototype duga built on the same site which was able to track launches from the Far East and submarines in the Pacific Ocean but both of these radar systems were aimed East and were fairly low powered the transmit and received sites were separated only by 16 miles and with the concept proven work began on an operational system this new Dugo 1 system was built in 1972 and due to its use of higher power the transmitter and receiver sites were separated by about 37 miles this would prevent the receiver sight from being overwhelmed by the transmission signal the original duga prototype was replaced by a pair of installations do go on in the west and dugatu in the East both consisting of separate transmit and receive sites dugatu was near to consomowsk on a more in kabarov's cry and will come to the location of duga one soon as a conventional radar can only see as far as the Horizon the Woodpecker got around this problem by bouncing its signal off the ionosphere enabling it to see Over the Horizon to do this an enormously powerful transmitter is needed the Duggar system was able to transmit at 10 megawatts monitoring station engineers in the UK thought that the actual Powers involved were in the tens of megawatts and the chief engineer of the BBC external broadcasting estimated power levels at 20 or 40 megawatts or perhaps more and said that the signal was likely audible in every part of the globe the Transmissions were apparently first heard in 1976 but prior to this a similar woodpecker interference Was Heard by radio amateurs in as early as 1963 or even before and these amateurs were calling this the Russian woodpecker the Transmissions which had a pulse configuration with a basic pulse repetition frequency of over 10 per second occurred between 5 and 22 megahertz were widely scattered and appeared to depend on the maximum usable frequency for propagation for example at dawn they could be expected on 14 and 22 megahertz and by 3 pm they'd be at 14 megahertz or lower when the interference first started it persisted for 10 to 12 hours at a time a representative of the home office International monitoring station in the UK said that the signals from the Woodpecker were affecting frequencies from 4 to about 27 megahertz almost all of the HF bands the use of pull signals LED experts at the time to suggest Woodpecker's purpose was either Over the Horizon radar or communication in either case a complicated system would be necessary to compensate for propagation variations and this led to speculation over the use of one or more transmission sources Over the Horizon radar seemed to be far more likely and it was nothing new in the late 1970s the U.S Air Force and the defense Advanced research projects agency or DARPA had been actively interested in Over the Horizon radar for about 15 years prior and were achieving distances of at least 1850 kilometers triangulation by amateur radio hobbyists and NATO later on showed that the signals came from a location in present-day Ukraine NATO defense experts believe they traced the transmitter to gomel in belarusia an industrial Town 175 miles Southeast of Minsk in the mid-1970s confusion due to the differences in the reports being made by various sources led to the site being given numerous locations near Kiev Minsk Chernobyl gomel and genev despite variations in location all reports describe the same deployment with the transmitter Southwest of Chernobyl south of Minsk and Northwest of Kiev and the receiver about 31 miles Northeast of Chernobyl just west of genev and south of gomel at one time there was speculation that several transmitters were in use experts were convinced that there were as many as four sources all transmitting the same or very nearly the same information perhaps from different locations the interference became so bad that most of the communication services within the bands in the UK complained through their respective organizations to the home office and to the frequency Registration Board of the international telecommunications Union or the itu other countries including the USA who were similarly affected by the Transmissions forwarded complaints to the itu and the Russian authorities a home office representative in the UK claimed that they'd made a complaint directly to the Russian authorities and that they replied saying that they were conducting tests and were taking steps to reduce the interference Friday the 17th of December 1978 saw the BBC ask the British government to make an official Complaint to Russia over what was termed blacked out broadcasts they said the interference came in the form of a woodpecker sound in the middle of programs which infuriated broadcasters Cairo radio said that it had been obliterated however a spokesman for the BBC monitoring station said that while this was an exaggeration the interference had been a considerable nuisance and occasionally made monitoring impossible Andy Clark w4iyt a radio amateur now unfortunately silent key claimed that he was operating a commercial aeronautical communication station that kept contact with long distance airliner flights by shortwave radio he said that suddenly during 1976 powerful interference came on the air disrupting Communications he said he named it the Woodpecker and when he asked the New York headquarters of his Communications firm if they too were experiencing this woodpecker sounding noise they were the signal he said was quote raising hell with the airplanes we just couldn't contact some of them radio amateurs relayed their complaints to their country's Communications regulators and many organizations along with governments in many countries protested to the Soviet Union officially the Soviet Union didn't even admit the signal was theirs there were many attempts to alleviate or even Jam the interference caused by the woodpecker some companies developed noise blanket devices to help with interference levels and then there was the Woodpecker hunting club consisting of radio amateurs they would record the signals coming from the Woodpecker and send them back they claimed the woodpecker's transmitters would actually move frequency when this was done correctly all those allegedly had better equipment and would synthesize the signals to the same effect Wayne Green publisher of the ham radio magazine 73 urged Tams to attack the problem and said if you want to screw up the radar signal all you have to do is send a return signal on its frequency which blocks out the Echoes he went on to say hams from the earliest woodpecker days have been driving the molster off their bands by getting on the frequency and sending properly spaced dots back the screen somewhere in Russia blanks out and The Operators utter some Russian Oaths and change the frequency to get rid of the interference he concluded by saying it works too say so many hums who have tried it although it greatly helps if several hams in different locations gang up on the Radar's frequency by the late 1980s the signal from the Woodpecker became less frequent and in 1989 it disappeared completely the real reason for the eventual shutdown of the duga systems were never made public however the beginning of the end of the Cold War was likely the reason another reason was probably the success of the usks early warning satellites which began entering service in the early 1980s and by this time had grown into a complete Network this satellite system provided immediate direct and highly secure warnings any radar-based system was subject to jamming as we've seen in this story and the effectiveness of any Over the Horizon radar system is always subject to atmospheric conditions although they're still used today it's also worth mentioning that the Soviet Union also had other over the horizon Radars one to monitor Chinese missile launches and another on the coastal Sea of Japan reportedly intended to monitor shipping aircraft and ballistic missile movements in the area between the coast of China and the island of Guam the Woodpecker site lies within the 30 kilometer exclusion Zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant the radar is permanently deactivated and doesn't receive much if any maintenance most of the array is as it was and pre-booked tours are available with a guard to those who wish to see it the Woodpecker and the duga radar systems remain to this day as perhaps one of the most infamous shortwave radio Oddities out there and it's highly likely that what we do know is eclipsed a million times over by what we don't know thank you

Channel: Ringway Manchester

Views: 1,020,214

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Id: wB_jiigRq-c

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/super_shizmo_matic]

Why do I get the feeling there is a woodpecker/stealth blimp connection?

[u/[deleted]]

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