The Russian Woodpecker

When someone goes to Chernobyl he often misses one thing that could be of big interest and is located just a few miles away from the exploded nuclear power plant.This is one of the three alike built by Russian army in Russia during the iron curtain times. As you can see is abandoned now.



The Russian Woodpecker was a notorious Soviet signal that could be heard on the shortwave radio bands worldwide between July 1976 and December 1989. It sounded like a sharp, repetitive tapping noise, at 10 Hz, giving rise to the "Woodpecker" name. The random frequency hops disrupted legitimate broadcast, amateur radio, and utility transmissions and resulted in thousands of complaints by many countries worldwide.



The signal was long believed to be that of an over-the-horizon radar (OTH) system. This theory was publicly confirmed after the fall of the Soviet Union, and is now known to be the Duga-3 system, part of the Soviet ABM early-warning network. This was something that NATO military intelligence was well aware of all along, having photographed it and giving it the NATO reporting name Steel Yard.