It was apparently informally known as “the woodpecker” because of the sound of the interference it would make. It’s interesting to read the amateur radio community’s response to it at the time: https://www.qsl.net/n1irz/woodpeck.html
> “If you want to screw up a radar signal, all you have to do is send a return signal on its frequency which blocks out the echos. Hams, from the earliest woodpecker days, have been driving the monster 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."
Well, that is kind of stale news. The sending of a few dots worked for a few weeks. I even participated. But a pack of angry hams sending dots was worse than the woodpecker. But anyway, after moving off the ham bands for a while, the woodpecker came back with a chirped signal. That was essentially unjammable.
Over-the-horizon HF radar needs to closely follow the MUF, staying just under it. So the woodpecker would drift up and down through the ham bands as the day want on.
I was working on the Jindalee OTHR at the time. We used to sit in the control room listening in on the Woodpecker. We also had quite a bit more power then the HAMs (beamformed) so they didn't ignore us.
(Jindalee also stayed clear of the HAM bands. The radar had frequency exclusion tables built into it and there was a switch which allowed the tables to be overridden if necessary. A number of techs were HAMs and made sure the HAM bands were respected.)
What the Hams are doing is radar jamming/interference; it’s not the ability to make the radar screen show whatever you’d like. That would be much, much, much more difficult (if it’s even possible).
As far as this sort of spoofing between nation-state actors, discussion is difficult because both the U.S. and Russia have been developing sophisticated ‘electronic countermeasures’ [1] for decades, and all their most interesting capabilities in this regard are certainly classified.
Put a reinforcement learning network on the task to recreate signals from a radar with a ham radio and see if it can learn it. That would be pretty sweet.
wikipedia says the transmitter used a pseudorandom sequence, so unless you could copy the PRNG output then you couldn't predict the sequence and generate appropriate returns.
Amateurs would just jam the whole frequency so the radar couldn't hear any returns at all.
Yes within d/c. So a priori you already need to be rather very close to the position of the object you want to fake appearing. At that point you might just as well put an object there.
I don't know what d/c means but if it's data connection then the fact that light (and other EM energy like radio waves) travel faster in air would probably be a problem for using that as a jamming approach
While I actually find this discussion interesting (serious), I just want to make the note that this is a military system and thought was undoubtedly applied to making it resistant to at least trivial jamming approaches. Hence the PRNG based timing for the transmission.
It would be more compelling if you outlined some ways that that approach might be stymied and how the soviets might have counteracted that.
Eastern Oregon had one of those, used from 1985-97, paired with one in California. (What frequencies?) After the cold war, WP says, it was used by the Border Patrol.(??)
I've visited this radar installation - of course, as another poster pointed out it was an OTH missile detection system. But a fun conspiracy theory floated by my guide was that this installation was intended as a Soviet weather control experiment. The evidence for that, such as it can be considered, was that allegedly there were supposed to be 12 reactors at Chernobyl, not just the famously exploded Reactor 4, which would have been an immense amount of energy production capability for one single location. Additionally, the nearby Pripyat was inhabited by the brightest of the bright, most elite of the Soviet population in an already highly secret portion of the Soviet Union. Who better to attempt that sort of endeavor? Plus, what powerful government doesn't wish it could control the weather?
Whether or not it's true, it clearly didn't work. But it sure is fun to think about.
edit: typos
Also, while I was there I picked up some forgotten artifacts in the form of old computer operations manuals, including one for the Russian ES EVM, which was a copy of the System/360. I scanned all the pages, maybe it would be interesting some people here: https://chernobylbooks.netlify.com/
The US had HAARP[0] which was researching use of high frequency radio waves in the upper atmosphere which was also surrounded by conspiracy theories. One theory was that HAARP was responsible for the massive flooding in the early 90s of the Mississippi river due to the Jet Stream to severely change course due to the effects of HAARP. Another was that HAARP opened up a hole in the atmosphere which allowed a small portion of Alaska to receive a much more intense dosing of solar radiation.
That was one of the stated purposes. They thought that they would be able to communicate with deeply submerged submarines with something more than 3 letter codes using ELF. They also thought they would be able to communicate further distances by reflecting the signals off of the ionosphere. They also thought they could disrupt warheads on re-entry. There was a lot of ideas about this place. I guess when you are getting the government to fund such a project it's going to need a lot of things it can pivot to when the original idea fails.
Clear AFB in Alaska has (maybe had) an operational radar station that looks very similar to the Russian one. Saw it in person a few times driving by as a kid. Not sure if it still exists or was upgraded with something smaller.
Sorry, wasn't trying to compare HAARP to Woodpecker by like for like purposes. I was mentioning more on totally odd radio installations cloaked in conspiracy.
There is a now-defunct Soviet-equivalent to HAARP called Sura Ionospheric Heating Facility, as well as facilities in Ukraine that contain similar arrays of antennae:
I went there too, trip of a lifetime. Of course, the disaster tourism angle makes it hard to get too excited, especially if you've spent time in Ukraine and spoken with the people affected.
Either way, the pictures do not do justice to the true scale of this thing. You come around the corner of an old single lane road through the woods and suddenly you can see part of it. It just keeps on getting larger and larger looking as you get closer.
Our tour was allowed to climb up a few levels, but most of us chickened out at the first platform.
> Meanwhile, the top Soviet EW warning commanders called OTH radar “virtually useless.”[88] Danilevich agreed, arguing that LUA was impossible before the development of satellites: “there were only above-the-horizon systems; there were no over-the-horizon systems ... These systems were not sufficiently reliable. They did not allow the reliable detection of launches. The only way to reliably determine the beginning of an attack is through human intelligence, but it is dubious that such data could be obtained.”[89] Apparently OTH radar operators would consult public reports about planned NASA space launches and then claim that they had tracked a launch on the appropriate day. But the ruse became obvious when weather delayed a launch.[90]
[88] Fischer, “The Soviet–American War Scare of the 1980s,” 502.
[89] Hines interview with Col. Gen. Danilevich, 24 September 1992, in Hines, Mishulovich, and Shull, “Soviet Intentions 1965–1985, Vol. II”, 41.
[90] Bruce G. Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1993), 205.
His footage from Duga is really amazing, he managed to shoot it with incredible lighting from the sunrise. I'd strongly recommend checking this out even if urbex isn't normally your thing.
They VFXed that into Allegiant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYyeROGcsIA from the Divergent Series as "The Wall that Encircles Chicago". I mean the thing itself, not the footage the youtuber did. Btw. when he is hoboing on some trains, his head is sometimes very near to the overhead wires.
I wonder if he ever heard of "Arcing"?
Whenever I read, see or, especially, visit such enormous abandoned man-made objects I have very specific feeling which is hard to put in words. Some wild yet soothing blend of awe and fear.
Does anyone else experience it? Is there a name for such feeling?
Really I think you're just describing awe, which as traditionally defined [0] always included (or at least, certainly did not preclude) an element of fear. This seems completely natural to me, but I grew up with a sort of old-fashioned understanding of certain English words. The use of the adjective 'awesome' in recent decades has perhaps helped people to forget its negative connotations.
This definitely resonates with me. These sorts of constructions have been an obsession of mine for as long as I can remember. There's a very specific feeling they conjure that I've never been able to put into words either, and I'm guessing it's similar to what you're feeling! There's definitely a morbid curiosity aspect to it which is why seemingly sinister things like this (or my fave, 33 Thomas St) have even more appeal.
I once watched a old black and white video on YouTube of an Ekranoplan (ground-effect vehicle) flying / gliding on the sea.
I was terrified the whole time and I'm still terrified if I look at it again. I have no idea why (I can watch any military hardware video without any fear).
I mean, it is conceptually kind of a nerve-wracking thing to fly. It's a plane that is constantly two seconds from nailing the ground/sea and crashing. And as you're ripping along at 300 mph you have to constantly scan for any ships that might be in your way, because you can't just fly over them.
One of the noted problems with it was pilot fatigue, for exactly this reason.
Ground effect aircraft are usually designed with enough extra power available that they can temporarily climb to higher altitudes to avoid surface obstacles or high waves, at the cost of increased fuel consumption.
Videos I've seen of the sound of an A-10 firing its main gun can inspire similar feelings, particularly when you hear the supersonic crack of the individual rounds before the rumble of the gun itself.
I've seen this used as a location in movie/tv show. It was used as the wall/barrier/border. I can't remember which one though. If it was not the actual Russian site, it had to have been the source of inspiration for the artists working on the show. I had to pause the show to look up images of the antenna array for comparison, and it was spot on. Just wish I could remember the title to look for screen shots.
If you go on the day-long Chernobyl tour from Kiev, they will take you into Pripyat as well as the Duga radar installation.
It's a very interesting trip.
I took some photos inside the radar control building. They had a lot of soviet era electronics laying around, as well as pictures of expected U.S. missiles that they were meant to track.
The secret radar? The massive, seen from the air, heard on the radio, reproduced in one of the top selling games of the last few years (PUBG) radar is a secret?
I can't wait to hear about the secret arch built in St Louis for the World Fair.
The signals were not secret, the physical structure was not necessarily viewed in the west until satellites took pictures. Certainly the mission in all its details and expectations are still classified and therefore secret.
It was a detection system, but it operated on frequencies that already in use by shortwave broadcast stations (much more prevalent then than now), amateur radio operators, etc and interfered with them.
This was before 9/11. Probably these are no longer allowed, but they would have an annual "open house", and my wife is from that area (which is sparsely populated) so we'd pop in. Inside I saw a 16-CPU parallel processing system developed by Western Electric specifically for this project in the late 60's (still operating).
For a longer and more detailed treatment of the Duga antenna and its connection to Cherbobyl, I can recommend the documentary "The Russian Woodpecker":
Of course it can transmit that far, it just takes a few hops.
What he was actually comparing the phone with was the so-called "huge computer" that processed all the data wires coming from the radar receiver sensors, not the radar transmitter itself.
4:25> Each radio receiver has lots of sensors. Each sensor has to be supplied with data wires and power. All data wires were going to the main control centre. It looked like a huge (let's say) computer. But believe me, this thing (waves phone) is much better than anything here. (laughs)
The Stanford Dish, built in 1961, was used to detect these and other sorts of signals. Rather than over the horizon it was via earth moon earth bounce.
I visited the Duga installation a couple of years ago (along with Chernobyl) and it really was utterly inspiring. I highly recommend it for nerds and non-nerds alike.
> “If you want to screw up a radar signal, all you have to do is send a return signal on its frequency which blocks out the echos. Hams, from the earliest woodpecker days, have been driving the monster 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."