
Soviet radar hidden in Chernobyl’s shadow [video] - wglb
https://www.bbc.com/reel/playlist/secret-worlds
======
teeray
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](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."

~~~
xxpor
The opposite behavior is kind of scary. What prevents someone from faking a
"missile echo" response?

~~~
oliveshell
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.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_countermeasure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_countermeasure)

~~~
jeherr
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.

------
vsnf
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/](https://chernobylbooks.netlify.com/)

~~~
dylan604
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.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program#Conspiracy_theories)

~~~
creeble
For non-hams, "high frequncy" here refers to the "HF" band of roughly 3-30MHz.

Or, as anyone else might call it, low frequency.

Afaik, it didn't work at whatever it was trying to do, which IIIRC had
something to do with submarines.

~~~
dylan604
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.

------
vilhelm_s
Apparently it never worked properly (from
[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09636412.2017.13...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09636412.2017.1331639)):

> 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.

------
tastroder
Huh, that looked familiar, YouTuber shiey climbed around on that thing a few
months back:
[https://youtu.be/jGPjj4B_jEk?t=7755](https://youtu.be/jGPjj4B_jEk?t=7755)

~~~
ripley12
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.

------
timeattack
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?

~~~
yetihehe
Probably you mean kenopsia[0]?

[0]
[https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/27720773573/...](https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/27720773573/kenopsia)

~~~
casefields
So that's what I feel on massive sound stages that are dark after we are done
shooting for the day.

------
mechhacker
I was there a few months back.

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.

[https://thesolidconcept.com/a-trip-to-
chernobyl/](https://thesolidconcept.com/a-trip-to-chernobyl/)

~~~
folli
I really enjoyed the read, thanks!

~~~
mechhacker
Glad you enjoyed it!

------
stevehawk
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.

~~~
finleymedia
Pictures of the radar array show up on Reddit r/AbandonedPorn all of the time.
People have climbed on top of it for pictures.

~~~
KaiserPro
not when it was turned on though...

------
trevyn
TLDW: A 1970s over-the-horizon radar for ICBMs that apparently didn’t work
very well.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga_radar](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga_radar)

~~~
rrmoelker
I couldn't quite figure out from the video if it was an early launch detection
system and/or a signal jammer. Cause the video mentions both.

A cursory glance at the Wikipedia article also didn't clear it up. Does anyone
know?

~~~
sciurus
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.

You can get more details on how it and similar systems work at
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-
horizon_radar](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-horizon_radar)

------
greatartiste
The Russians have just started transmitting from a new OTHR called Konteyner
..

[https://planesandstuff.wordpress.com/2020/02/25/russian-
othr...](https://planesandstuff.wordpress.com/2020/02/25/russian-
othr-29b6-konteyner-analysis/)

also ..

[https://planesandstuff.wordpress.com/2020/03/06/konteyner-
fo...](https://planesandstuff.wordpress.com/2020/03/06/konteyner-follow-up/)

The HF bands are full of OTHRs at the moment. There are Russian ones , Iranian
ones and a British one from Cyprus among many others.

------
dboreham
I've visited, including inside, the US equivalent :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FPQ-16_PARCS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FPQ-16_PARCS)

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).

------
kratom_sandwich
For a longer and more detailed treatment of the Duga antenna and its
connection to Cherbobyl, I can recommend the documentary "The Russian
Woodpecker":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Russian_Woodpecker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Russian_Woodpecker)

------
jve
Thar guy takes out his phone and says something along the lines that the phone
is way better than that, believe me.

Really? Is phone hardware capable of transmitting that far? I have hard time
believing that. Processing power? Sure.

~~~
DonHopkins
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)

------
walrus01
People have flown FPV quadcopters around it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhJpdCZNSDc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhJpdCZNSDc)

------
CalChris
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.

[https://medium.com/dish/tech-history-the-story-behind-
stanfo...](https://medium.com/dish/tech-history-the-story-behind-stanfords-
satellite-dish-hiking-trail-in-palo-alto-fc44745be409)

------
jgrahamc
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.

------
ohiovr
It became the brain scorcher in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R shadow of chernobyl games.

------
DonHopkins
Wow, the Pokemon Go graffiti at 4:58 is hilarious!

------
gumby
Warning: video

