When I was 17 in 1983, an older neighbor had a garage sale and I bought for $10 a Zenith "Transoceanic" shortwave radio receiver. I put that thing in my bedroom and extended the antenna and I could listen to Radio Moscow, Radio Free Europe, and all sorts of other stations, especially at night. One peculiarity about HF radios is that they work far better at night, when signals from the other side of the world can bounce off the ionosphere and reach your antenna. Also, when I used HF radios for communications over the Atlantic back when I flew 747-200's, I was told to use higher frequencies when the sun was high, and lower frequencies when the sun was low. Back to the radio, which is from around 1949: One particular frequency had this weird "tick tick tick tick tick" sound, and I always wondered what that was all about. Someone else did a YT video on the Soviet "Woodpecker" over the pole early warning systems, so I already knew about these. The array has been used in movies, including "Divergent". Great video!
I remember my father having a world map in the 1990s mounted on the wall. He used pins to mark each city from which he heard a shortwave broadcast. It was quite the map.
Cool little radio wave tidbit I learned in the Air Force. One night we were out on the plane doing some work when one of our NCO's asked if I wanted to see something cool. He set up HF, and transmitted a quick "Hi". A few seconds later, we heard a "Hi" come in. That was the night I learned you can send an HF signal around the world if the conditions are right. Did it a few times to freak out the new guys. One actually thought he was talking to someone else and got mad they were just repeating him. Good times. But radio is really cool when you dig into it.
fake. Sending a radio signal around the world only takes 1/7th of a second. You would hear the Hi full ass seconds later, but almost immediately after sending it. As in, while you're enunciating the i, the H has already made it back around to you. This also means that if you're running a half duplex system, your finger would still be pressing the transmit button, meaning you wouldn't have received another at all. Nice attempt at a fake story tho. I'm ready to receive your impotent outrage now.
round-the-world takes 1/7th of a second, when worldwide propagation is on, you literally hear the echo, but it's fast a few seconds is a mystery, there are plenty of reports, but the physics would be quite absurd en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_delayed_echo I think it's all bs - or jokes, technically not that hard to pull off with stuff any major HF using organization has a 2s echo is consistent with moonbounce at mcrowave frequencies, but takes a lot more work
@@spamhog It was described as going around the world, but moon bounce is a possibility. I may have been a bit off on the timing described. A quick "Hello" and about the time you unkeyed the mic you heard "Hello".
I bet dude.... Using ADF flying the beams in a plane is annoying enough with all that nonstop beeping lol. At least in a flight sim you can turn that shit off in the cans lol
Scrolled down looking for the first one to mention this modern classic. That gondola climb was so sketchy it has permanently burned itself to my brain, esp as he walks past a whole bunch of them that have dislodged due to rust metal fatigue and wind at the bottom of the structure.
I've seen both Chernobyl and Duga up close and, honestly, Duga was far more impressive. I'm a little annoyed that you didn't go into the idea that the radar was intended to use the Doppler Effect to detect missile launches rather than direct observation. When radar hits an object moving away or towards the radar array, relatively speaking, the signal itself encounters a slight Doppler Shift, raising or lowering the frequency of the reflected radio signal. THAT's all they were looking for, just a slight shift in the reflected signal that would indicate ICBMs (very fast objects, launched toward the array and raising the frequency of the reflected radio signals) had been launched at the USSR. It was an incredibly simple and complex and genius idea.
The Duga Radar is a feature of the game "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl". In the game instead of being a Radar it is a transmission device to control the minds of combatants within "The Zone".
Amature radio enthusist here. Calling cellphone signals "low frequencie" makes my head hurt. AM radio would have been a better example. Cell phone signals are well above HF frequencies and exist very much in the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) range with 5g getting into the microwave bands. Cell phone towers effectively work line of sight. There maybe buildings or trees in the way, but I garentee you cellphone tech is very much line of sight and works quite poorly if it's blocked by a mountain or too much stuff.
@@foxtrotunit1269 The Duga radar has already featured in stalker before where it is used as a transmitter for a secret experiment called the brainscorcher
Sounds like a great name for a washing powder, I can see the adline now "try new Chernobylite powder, forget those bluey-whites you get with some powders, Chernobylite gives you fluorescent greeney-whites, and they glow in the dark too!" --- lol
I worked on enviro assessment of an arctic (Baffin Island) DEW line site. Banks of vacuum tubes frozen in ice in the buildings, transcripts of intercepted radio calls (Koren war firefights) in landfills. The endless efforts to listen in and/or prevent intelligence gathering and radar are fascinating.
The Moscow Muffler, an ingenious device designed and sold by Advanced Electronic Applications (AEA) in Washington state was sold to radio Amateurs and shortwave listeners in the seventies and eighties. It attached to the loudspeaker output in the radio and would filter out the Russian Woodpecker. The Woodpecker would often make the shortwave bands utterly useless for communications without the Moscow Muffler filter. Details of the Moscow Muffler can be found online. I just love the name of that old device.
I went thru the Special Operations Communications Sergeant school in the mid ‘80’s. We were trained deal with them by mitigating techniques, it was referred to Electronic Countermeasures. Unfortunately for me, I was later assigned to an organization that was tasked with dealing the OTHR in the Eastern Russia SSR. In other words, it was a “get to the target with all, let’s say, 24 dudes, then win a gunfight with 250-350 Strategic Rocket Forces and then put it out of commission for 24-72 hours. Yea, I wrote my first will at 19.
@@LaLaLand.Germanyits something from the call of duty game's zombies gamemode, in the game they released named Cold War, the Duga radar was featured in a map and on top was the iconic to the franchise pack a punch machine that upgrades players weapons
Good enough for government work Simon. As some commentators below pointed out, the script went off track a number of times when referring to specific frequency spectrum bands and propagation characteristics but fair is fair, you delivered a really interesting Megaprojects edition for those of us in the "Wireless" game. :) .... Slainte!
Just a note to the more inquisitive MF is 300KHz to 3 MHz HF is 3-30 MHz VHF is 30-300 MHz UHF is 300 to 3000 MHz [3 GHZ] It's generally agreed amongst amateur radio operators and electrical engineers approximately 30 MHz depending on conditions is where things go between bounce off the ionosphere and things go right out into space. This is callled the MUF . Or maximum usable frequency. The MUF can on rare occasions go all the way up into the 2-meter band aprox 146 MHz or so.
@@JoeHamelin ah yes 6M 😉 Up until I got my new rig [IC7000]a few months ago that was one of the Bands I was missing from my original ham Shack.. G90... Granted I've been doing a metric ton of tinkering new antenna designs for LoRA Meshtastic. My QTH is 320m above my local city... Just last week I was getting 100 km on 100mW. This stuff is insanely fun I've been an amateur radio operator for 23years... II love Simon's videos but this one made me really wheeze...
I just have a mental image of putting a long wire antenna to the headphone jack of my cell phone and tapping out some CW on the screen😅 @@eliotmansfield
When I was a young engineer I had a chance to work for a few months at a similar facility in USSR. Let's skip technical bits and talk about living conditions of the staff most of whom like me graduated from best technical universities of USSR with masters degree, and some like me having so called "red diploma" - 75% or more subjects marked as high distinction. I am talking about living conditions. If I had a family - myself, my wife and a kid - I would live in a room 6 by 4 meters. Common toilet and shower for some 20 rooms. So is the kitchen. In 6..7 years if I got promotion to head of department which was pretty likely event I would get a two room apartments of 40 sqm or so. Nearest schools are 7 miles away, public transport pretty much non existent and purchasing a car would be a real challenge not to mention quality of roads in the area. I was offered a position there with quite good salary but I refused as I prefered to get back to my town earning half what I was offered but living in better conditions.
The receiver is a thing of beauty if in a rather brutal manner. Perhaps as no missiles were fired for it to detect it was never found not to be effective but it was deemed reassuring to have it.
One of my course works when I was studing at a technical university in USSR was about over horizon radars. Even I a student could realise how cost ineffective those systems were. Very expensive to build and run. But noone would listen to me. They wasted money on projects like this one and then they were supprised when USSR collapsed.
This brings back memories. I first got my HAM Novice license in 1979 and upgraded to General Class in 1982. The "Russian Woodpecker" was a pervasive annoyance. I do remember knowing it was Russian Radar, but that was it. More importantly, it was screwing up my hunt for DX on CW. Bastards.
The US had very good OTH radar. I had a relative who was involved in the General Electric built installations, during the 70's and 80's. He told me that they were so sensitive that they could detect submerged submarines by the surface ripples they produced. They were also able to track aircraft and compare their flight paths with those on file, for the entire hemisphere. They once even saved a Soviet airliner that had lost its navigation instruments, by having it make several turns, until they could verify it. Eventually, it was able to land safely. It was one of those Cold War events that had a good ending. Unfortunately, when the Soviet Union collapsed, we decided to dismantle them all. What a waste.
At some point, we radio amateurs, came together and starting jamming the Doppler, or woodpecker transmitter. In Europe the one in Ukraine, and the Americans in the east of the Soviet Union, there was also one. An international collaboration. Even control instances didn't check on us. And let the jamming commence. We had a big LOG Periodic and with 3500w on antenna, we burst test tones, after a few hours, the Woodpecker came back online. And we restarted again. It was illegal from our part, but the woodpecker was everywhere with harmonics. And we sent them a surprise.
Fun fact: One of the big reasons for the theory being that it would melt your brain is because the Woodpecker sound had an ASMR effect on some of the people that heard it, and thus freaked them out because ASMR wasn't really a thing back then.
I watched a RUclips video where this young British man slipped into the exclusion zone with the help of a guide (this was prior to the war). He climbed to the top of DUGA 2 and climbed out onto one of the antenna structures doing a selfie (I am so afraid of heights I had to go into the other room and lay down until he got down -- meanwhile I am screaming back towards the computer room for him to get down off of there). After he got down, he walked past DUGA 1. On the ground was a bunch of the same types of antennas he had stood on. They were falling off of the structure. Then the Ukranian military came after them and they had to run.
Your radio frequencies are a bit confused, Simon. High Frequency Radio, also known as Shortwave Radio, is indeed the Band from 3 to 30 MHz, but your cellphone runs on Ultra High Frequency, UHF, which is from 300 to 3,000 MHz, and your router can have a bandwidth in that range. But the wifi itself runs on 2,400 MHz, 5,200 MHz (2.4 GHz, 5.2 GHz) or even higher. This is near to Super High Frequency, SHF, which is split into smaller segments, such as L Band, Ku Band, X Band, Ka Band on so on. SHF is from 3,000 MHz to 30,000 MHz. (Satellite TV in the West runs at X Band, around 11 to 12 GHz, and Russian Molniya TV satellites are above 3 GHz.) LOS Radar tends to run at similar frequencies, often above 8GHz for civilian systems, which gives a good compromise between resolution and Radar pulse power capability. At 10 GHz, wavelength is 3 cms, and that can resolve objects clearly which are 30 cms (about 12") across or larger. In practice, a rule of 10 tines wavelength is the generally accepted good resolution limit. A reflective object of about 2 wavelengths across can be detected, in theory, but positional accuracy and sensitivity are very limited at that point. So a 3 cms wavelength with show faint reflections from objects which have a cross section of about 10 cms (4 inches). Military aircraft and missile systems often use higher frequencies for better resolution of small projectiles. Roadside Doppler Radar systems for traffic detection often run at around 58 GHz, and are fairly short range because the signal is absorbed relatively quickly by our atmosphere. OTH Radar using, say, 10 MHz, has a wavelength of 30 metres (100 feet), and can only resolve clearly objects with a Radar cross section of 300 Metres; the size of an oil tanker. The smallest object it can hope to detect might have a Radar cross section of about the size of a large non-stealth bomber or an airliner, such as an A380. But the maximum useable frequency, and therefore the resolution of smaller targets, might be limited to as low as 6 MHz because of ionospheric and atmospheric conditions, which vary quickly, as anyone who has tried to listen to long distance Shortwave radio can tell you.
@Eldorado-uz1ld It is not a marvel. It is a total disaster. They wasted money on useless projects like this one while making people live if not in poverty then in low middle class conditions. Very low middle class I would say.
During the late 90's when I was starting to get into computers as a kid, I got a 5.1 Logitech speaker system. Placing the rear satellites on home built wooden pillars, I ran the cables out to those speakers as well. At first I just noticed random static at times. But, this being the 90's with phones and god knows what causing interference, I didn't think much of it. Then I started to notice that if I started to get the static, and then sat _very_ still, I could hear radio! Not Swedish radio as I would expect though, but Russian, Finnish, German... Sometimes I found an awkward position to sit in where it would get through quite clear. Turns out the cables to my satellite speakers were acting as antennas, and I was capturing radio broadcasts from around the world at absolutely terrible quality. Good times!
Terry Pratchett was inspired by the Duga radar to put something called The Woodpecker into his novel Going Postal, which disabled communications towers on the klacks network
That’s concerning… as a guy who works on all kinds of electronics, they spontaneously fail way too often to trust to not randomly launch terra tons of nukes in a moment over a bum capacitor 😬
Great vid, from the good ol' days of triangulation and tesla dew's. Now do one on phased arrays, what could be done if you had let's say 40.000 emittors in a parabolic pattern. In orbit. Combined output, accuracy etc.. 🤘😆 Sidenote. Reactor 1 was built simultaniously and with the specs to run the "radar". The woodpecker sounds like early burst communication on the side.. But it was so versatile it's still totally classified
Another great video by Simon. Just one very rare mistake. Cellular telephone calls don't involve low frequencies. The oldest 2g or Second Generation legacy frequencies were about 600 mhz to 2100mhz. As demands for cell services worldwide has evolved, bandwidth in increasingly higher frequencies has been utilized. The lowest frequencies being used today, "HF" or high frequency go down to about 2mhz. (The HF bands are the ones used to transmit globally). The higher bands that Fifth Generation, 5G have expanded into are the highest frequencies, traditionally used for radar. The highest, millimeter wave are 24-53 ghz, travel the shortest distance.
Voice calls on cell phones are still transmitted over high-frequency signals. Digital compression codecs just cram the signal down to a lower bitrate so more calls can be handled over the same cell tower beam
I drove from kiev airport traveling to do charity work in belarus and we saw the duga radar in the distance its only about 3/4 km from the chernobyl power plant. the radar is huge, we could see it we rekoned from about 8/9 kms away
HF/SW/MW are still used to some degree and I'm pretty sure you can still sometimes hear the woodpecker. I might be wrong on that, but it has a label in the frequency spectrum of the online radio I use to listen to radio traffic in Europe lol. There are 2 other Russian signals that might also be interesting to you... the "Buzzer" and the "Stalingrad Ticking Clock." Ringway Manchester has some great videos about radios and odd signals. It might be a fun idea to do a collab with him about HF/SW radio.
I knew I'd see another fan here in the comments somewhere. That guy makes some really in depth content that I enjoy even if I don't always fully understand. Ringway is how I know about the woodpecker myself. I've really been thinking about venturing into experimentation because of his videos alone 😂 I'm a serial hobbyist that's been in search of a new one for a year or two.
@@goosenotmaverick1156 Radio can be a great hobby but it can also seem rather discouraging in the early days when a tiny little mistake makes ya get zero results or such. This might sound weird, but if you're looking for a new hobby, you might want to try journalling first. Journalling can be a great hobby on its own, but it also pairs really well with some other hobbies including radio. It's a great way of documenting your progress and will get you in the habit of writing down interesting frequencies you find lol.
@little-wytch I'm an electrician so the odd disappointment and such isn't new to me. I enjoy troubleshooting so that's why I thought it might be a good hobby. But, I have been told more than once about Journaling (not specifically in relation to radio, but as a hobby) more than once. Maybe it's time to take you folks up on that advice, if I've gotten it more than one place I assume it's probably a good idea. Thank you for your time and reply, I appreciate it and the honesty about the hobby. It's that kind of thing I need to have as well as the positives before I jump in. I'm coming from aquariums and plants as a hobby. Documenting testing results and such like that a little, but not as much as I probably should have. It seems I need to get better at that first. Thanks! I'm watching a ringway video right now, I paused to read your reply actually haha.
@@goosenotmaverick1156not all SDRs cover full SW, some are just amateur bands. Many have MW, and some even have LF, famously the "Twente WebSDR" in the Netherlands, which can accommodate dozens of simultaneous listeners (most SDRs do about 4).
@@goosenotmaverick1156Learn what the HF international broadcast bands are so you can scan effectively. Learn about utility and amateur too, there are digital AM, slow scan tv, weather fax, shipping teletype, and other modes in use and SDRs have choices to reconfigure to decode these. The loss of many shortwave broadcasters since the 80s is balanced out somewhat now by being able to DX from anywhere. Have fun!
From 1976 until 1982 l worked for a letter agency and became aware of this plus some Russian, East German and Chinese numbers stations. I bought a short wave radio at a yards sale. At this time particularly on rainy or overcast nights l could get a couple different numbers stations. I'd let my friends listen and they'd freak when they hear a Russia or Chinese person, frequently a woman chanting (reading numbers) they would freak out. I'd tell them the Woodpecker was aliens
I have been obsessed with the Duga ever since I seen it online when I was a kid. I have watched every video on RUclips I can find about it. And read many websites. I would love to go look at it in person
I remember hearing the Russian Woodpecker on my CB radio back in the 80s. I never could figure out what it was. Just a side note is that this radar is located not far from Chernobyl nuclear plant, so it probably got its power from there
I went to Chernobyl in 2012 and the Duga Radar was off limits back then. We could see it from where we stood not far from the power plant, but it was a spec on the horizon from there.
At 11:25 I believe that you mis-spoke. Low frequency radio waves bounce off of the ionosphere whereas high frequencies go through the ionosphere. This is why we talk to satellites and space craft with VHF and higher. de VA3NIE You might have been caught up in the old frequency nomenclature where there is Low and High frequencies or HF radio from 1.8 - 30 MHz was mainly used which are bounced off of the ionosphere but then experiments were made with even higher frequencies and once you get to over 50MHz there is little bouncing off of the ionosphere. Yes, the nomenclature gets confusing.
It could be used to calculate the humidity of the air at different heights, to carry out experiments with water vapor at different heights, to calculate the speed of sound at different temperatures, to calculate the particles in the air, the atmospheric conditions, and instead the great homeland has not looked in the face of anyone and has the best scientists around the world
You guys got your radio wave properties backwards, lower freqs dont penetrate well but bounce off the ionisphere. Higher freqs penetrate better but are shorter range and los. Cellphones are in the gigahertz range while radios typically dont go higher than 900 megahertz or so (less than 1 Ghz).
A bit of a mistake Simon. High frequencies pass through the ionosphere, low frequencies bounce off. Also this bouncing or skipping varies greatly with atmospheric conditions, solar activity etc.
Simon needs to get with @RingwayManchester, he's a gold mine of data and Simon is Mister Presentstion Magic, the two together is like peanutbutter and caramel inside chocolate.
I always find it amusing when people tell stories like this and feel the need to add dramatic affect for people who don't understand how such things work by pointing out that it was such the mystery of where radio waves were coming from. "Didn't know where it came from" can be directly translated into "The Russians (or whoever) didn't do a press release stating the address of the transmitter so we had to turn on a couple direction finders for a second."
I remeber the woodpecker, used to listen to Radio Luxembourg, but sometimes the Russians showed up, not a big deal It was a digital device, according to an article, and very complicated.
I had a "ghetto blaster" that I bought in about 1987 that had shortwave capability. I was fascinated that I could listen to radio stations all around the world, including "Radio Budapest", an English-language Warsaw-Pact propaganda station. But I remember this damn noise - which I always thought sounds more like a helicopter - that would come in over top of things, whatever they were. It would show up, move away, etc. It wasn't until many years later that I learned what it was.
When I was 17 in 1983, an older neighbor had a garage sale and I bought for $10 a Zenith "Transoceanic" shortwave radio receiver. I put that thing in my bedroom and extended the antenna and I could listen to Radio Moscow, Radio Free Europe, and all sorts of other stations, especially at night.
One peculiarity about HF radios is that they work far better at night, when signals from the other side of the world can bounce off the ionosphere and reach your antenna. Also, when I used HF radios for communications over the Atlantic back when I flew 747-200's, I was told to use higher frequencies when the sun was high, and lower frequencies when the sun was low.
Back to the radio, which is from around 1949: One particular frequency had this weird "tick tick tick tick tick" sound, and I always wondered what that was all about. Someone else did a YT video on the Soviet "Woodpecker" over the pole early warning systems, so I already knew about these. The array has been used in movies, including "Divergent".
Great video!
I remember my father having a world map in the 1990s mounted on the wall. He used pins to mark each city from which he heard a shortwave broadcast. It was quite the map.
Jeeez you've lived a good life
@@coconutsmarties Jeeez I'm glad that you are impressed~
Also HF MRC138 radios were some of the only radios that could tx and rx during helacious sand storms in the desert.
747 jockey. Very cool.
Cool little radio wave tidbit I learned in the Air Force. One night we were out on the plane doing some work when one of our NCO's asked if I wanted to see something cool.
He set up HF, and transmitted a quick "Hi". A few seconds later, we heard a "Hi" come in.
That was the night I learned you can send an HF signal around the world if the conditions are right. Did it a few times to freak out the new guys. One actually thought he was talking to someone else and got mad they were just repeating him.
Good times. But radio is really cool when you dig into it.
fake. Sending a radio signal around the world only takes 1/7th of a second. You would hear the Hi full ass seconds later, but almost immediately after sending it. As in, while you're enunciating the i, the H has already made it back around to you. This also means that if you're running a half duplex system, your finger would still be pressing the transmit button, meaning you wouldn't have received another at all.
Nice attempt at a fake story tho. I'm ready to receive your impotent outrage now.
That would have been long path communication.
round-the-world takes 1/7th of a second, when worldwide propagation is on, you literally hear the echo, but it's fast
a few seconds is a mystery, there are plenty of reports, but the physics would be quite absurd
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_delayed_echo
I think it's all bs
- or jokes, technically not that hard to pull off with stuff any major HF using organization has
a 2s echo is consistent with moonbounce at mcrowave frequencies, but takes a lot more work
@@spamhog It was described as going around the world, but moon bounce is a possibility. I may have been a bit off on the timing described. A quick "Hello" and about the time you unkeyed the mic you heard "Hello".
"Ask him if he's got any grid squares"
I was stationed in Berlin doing morse intercept in 76 77 78. That frickin thing drove us nuts. It covered a huge band of frequencies.
These are the comments I like to see.
I bet dude.... Using ADF flying the beams in a plane is annoying enough with all that nonstop beeping lol. At least in a flight sim you can turn that shit off in the cans lol
Radio nav is cool though and a dying art
Dam
Shoutout to Shiey, who climbed Duga. Epic pictures when he's in one of those top gondolas.
Was hoping to see someone mention him in this comment section! :D
Scrolled down looking for the first one to mention this modern classic. That gondola climb was so sketchy it has permanently burned itself to my brain, esp as he walks past a whole bunch of them that have dislodged due to rust metal fatigue and wind at the bottom of the structure.
The Duga Radar, remembered fondly to a certain subset of the Internet Population as "The Brain Scorcher"
Privyet, STALKER
Get out of here stalker
Chiki breeki bratan
See you all in the zone comrades
A nu, Cheeki Breeki!!!
I've seen both Chernobyl and Duga up close and, honestly, Duga was far more impressive. I'm a little annoyed that you didn't go into the idea that the radar was intended to use the Doppler Effect to detect missile launches rather than direct observation. When radar hits an object moving away or towards the radar array, relatively speaking, the signal itself encounters a slight Doppler Shift, raising or lowering the frequency of the reflected radio signal. THAT's all they were looking for, just a slight shift in the reflected signal that would indicate ICBMs (very fast objects, launched toward the array and raising the frequency of the reflected radio signals) had been launched at the USSR. It was an incredibly simple and complex and genius idea.
Been there too, place was stripped but all those missile identification posters were still up.
@@DavidSmith-fm5lxare the actual structures still there?
@@thecakeisapie5148the array in the video? Very much so
He kind of did, actually. Mentioning its usefulness for early warning missile detection.
The Duga Radar is a feature of the game "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl". In the game instead of being a Radar it is a transmission device to control the minds of combatants within "The Zone".
cheeki breeki
Good to see the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fan base emerge again!
@@mikev2116 we never left, we're always here
@@mobiusone6154 Yes we are
"Turn people into mindless zombies"... social media has achieved that
Worse actually, These zombies are still humanish but insane
Amature radio enthusist here.
Calling cellphone signals "low frequencie" makes my head hurt. AM radio would have been a better example.
Cell phone signals are well above HF frequencies and exist very much in the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) range with 5g getting into the microwave bands.
Cell phone towers effectively work line of sight. There maybe buildings or trees in the way, but I garentee you cellphone tech is very much line of sight and works quite poorly if it's blocked by a mountain or too much stuff.
Mobile phone signals Low frequency. CHEERS honey bunny.
I'm not sure many people under the age of about 40 know what AM radio is.
Youre still wrong kiddo. @@UnbelievableEricthegiraffe
THANK YOU. I was thinking the explanation in the video was a little off too
Yea that part explains the frequencies was pretty terrible
I just finished Chernobylite (a video game that prominently features the Duga radar) so this is nice to see! Thank you for this!!
💯 absolutely love Cherobylite. Also Stalker 2 (soon to be released) is said to be featuring the Duga aswell
@@foxtrotunit1269 The Duga radar has already featured in stalker before where it is used as a transmitter for a secret experiment called the brainscorcher
Yeah it's a good game that.
no one "finishes" a video game
Sounds like a great name for a washing powder, I can see the adline now "try new Chernobylite powder, forget those bluey-whites you get with some powders, Chernobylite gives you fluorescent greeney-whites, and they glow in the dark too!" --- lol
I worked on enviro assessment of an arctic (Baffin Island) DEW line site. Banks of vacuum tubes frozen in ice in the buildings, transcripts of intercepted radio calls (Koren war firefights) in landfills. The endless efforts to listen in and/or prevent intelligence gathering and radar are fascinating.
CFS alert is used as a remote listening post, the actual operators are at CFB Leitrim.
The Moscow Muffler, an ingenious device designed and sold by Advanced Electronic Applications (AEA) in Washington state was sold to radio Amateurs and shortwave listeners in the seventies and eighties. It attached to the loudspeaker output in the radio and would filter out the Russian Woodpecker. The Woodpecker would often make the shortwave bands utterly useless for communications without the Moscow Muffler filter.
Details of the Moscow Muffler can be found online. I just love the name of that old device.
I went thru the Special Operations Communications Sergeant school in the mid ‘80’s. We were trained deal with them by mitigating techniques, it was referred to Electronic Countermeasures. Unfortunately for me, I was later assigned to an organization that was tasked with dealing the OTHR in the Eastern Russia SSR. In other words, it was a “get to the target with all, let’s say, 24 dudes, then win a gunfight with 250-350 Strategic Rocket Forces and then put it out of commission for 24-72 hours. Yea, I wrote my first will at 19.
Why do they have you training for that?
isn't that what the Strategic Atomic demolition Munitions suicide jumpers would be for?
What Simon forgot to mention is that there’s a pack-a-punch machine up there.
i was looking for a fellow cold war player 😂
May I ask what a pack a punch machine would be? Have a nice day
@@LaLaLand.Germanyits something from the call of duty game's zombies gamemode, in the game they released named Cold War, the Duga radar was featured in a map and on top was the iconic to the franchise pack a punch machine that upgrades players weapons
@@bower31 Ahh, okay, thanks. I´m not a cod guy, more the San Andreas type. I love cars AND shooting ;)
Have a nice day, good explain!
Isn’t the D.I.E ammo crates on the there too? 🤭
In the early 80's when Shortwave in the USA was still in use, I heard the woodpecker a lot.
Good enough for government work Simon. As some commentators below pointed out, the script went off track a number of times when referring to specific frequency spectrum bands and propagation characteristics but fair is fair, you delivered a really interesting Megaprojects edition for those of us in the "Wireless" game. :) .... Slainte!
Just a note to the more inquisitive
MF is 300KHz to 3 MHz
HF is 3-30 MHz
VHF is 30-300 MHz
UHF is 300 to 3000 MHz [3 GHZ]
It's generally agreed amongst amateur radio operators and electrical engineers approximately 30 MHz depending on conditions is where things go between bounce off the ionosphere and things go right out into space. This is callled the MUF . Or maximum usable frequency.
The MUF can on rare occasions go all the way up into the 2-meter band aprox 146 MHz or so.
And then there is 6m, or 50MHz, also known as the Magic Band that sits between the two modes.
@@JoeHamelin ah yes 6M 😉
Up until I got my new rig [IC7000]a few months ago that was one of the Bands I was missing from my original ham Shack..
G90...
Granted I've been doing a metric ton of tinkering new antenna designs for LoRA Meshtastic.
My QTH is 320m above my local city...
Just last week I was getting 100 km on 100mW. This stuff is insanely fun
I've been an amateur radio operator for 23years...
II love Simon's videos but this one made me really wheeze...
yes i was frowning when he said mobile phones are hf.
73
I just have a mental image of putting a long wire antenna to the headphone jack of my cell phone and tapping out some CW on the screen😅
@@eliotmansfield
When I was a young engineer I had a chance to work for a few months at a similar facility in USSR. Let's skip technical bits and talk about living conditions of the staff most of whom like me graduated from best technical universities of USSR with masters degree, and some like me having so called "red diploma" - 75% or more subjects marked as high distinction. I am talking about living conditions. If I had a family - myself, my wife and a kid - I would live in a room 6 by 4 meters. Common toilet and shower for some 20 rooms. So is the kitchen. In 6..7 years if I got promotion to head of department which was pretty likely event I would get a two room apartments of 40 sqm or so. Nearest schools are 7 miles away, public transport pretty much non existent and purchasing a car would be a real challenge not to mention quality of roads in the area. I was offered a position there with quite good salary but I refused as I prefered to get back to my town earning half what I was offered but living in better conditions.
The receiver is a thing of beauty if in a rather brutal manner. Perhaps as no missiles were fired for it to detect it was never found not to be effective but it was deemed reassuring to have it.
Plot twist: the ruskies were just trying to snag the satellite signal for the Playboy channel.
No way, dude. It was a serious criminal offence in USSR.
Lmfao😂😂
😏
Da comrade
@@andreypetrov4868, clearly it was a government backed research project into capitalist propaganda that required detailed research.
The Russians were just finding a way to cook a Hot Pocket without part of it being frozen while part of it being lava hot.
This is the thing that runs Red Scare Linux
One of my course works when I was studing at a technical university in USSR was about over horizon radars. Even I a student could realise how cost ineffective those systems were. Very expensive to build and run. But noone would listen to me. They wasted money on projects like this one and then they were supprised when USSR collapsed.
The pack-a-punch is on the top of that thing
This brings back memories. I first got my HAM Novice license in 1979 and upgraded to General Class in 1982. The "Russian Woodpecker" was a pervasive annoyance. I do remember knowing it was Russian Radar, but that was it. More importantly, it was screwing up my hunt for DX on CW. Bastards.
The US had very good OTH radar. I had a relative who was involved in the General Electric built installations, during the 70's and 80's. He told me that they were so sensitive that they could detect submerged submarines by the surface ripples they produced. They were also able to track aircraft and compare their flight paths with those on file, for the entire hemisphere.
They once even saved a Soviet airliner that had lost its navigation instruments, by having it make several turns, until they could verify it. Eventually, it was able to land safely. It was one of those Cold War events that had a good ending.
Unfortunately, when the Soviet Union collapsed, we decided to dismantle them all. What a waste.
We had an array like that in Germany in 1967. The operators said they could listen to conversations in downtown Moscow a thousand miles away.
Thousand miles on HF is short range.
You can listen to comms 20 000 km away...
"Nikita Jrushchov"?
Very good. Would like to see more videos on big radio projects and radio weirdness
Reminds me to watch ringway Manchester
Aye another one! I knew I'd see some other folks that watch him in here somewhere 😂
Yes another another clickbait channel with zero new information.
@@PortsmouthHarbourBoats have you not watched the series on pirate radio Buzz Fm? Fascinating stuff.
The end of the video was very funny! Thanks!
At some point, we radio amateurs, came together and starting jamming the Doppler, or woodpecker transmitter. In Europe the one in Ukraine, and the Americans in the east of the Soviet Union, there was also one. An international collaboration. Even control instances didn't check on us. And let the jamming commence. We had a big LOG Periodic and with 3500w on antenna, we burst test tones, after a few hours, the Woodpecker came back online. And we restarted again. It was illegal from our part, but the woodpecker was everywhere with harmonics. And we sent them a surprise.
Walked all around this antenna in 2018 when touring Chornobyl. It's a huge structure.
i have morbid curiosity to this whole region. Awesome video bro
Fun fact: One of the big reasons for the theory being that it would melt your brain is because the Woodpecker sound had an ASMR effect on some of the people that heard it, and thus freaked them out because ASMR wasn't really a thing back then.
I watched a RUclips video where this young British man slipped into the exclusion zone with the help of a guide (this was prior to the war). He climbed to the top of DUGA 2 and climbed out onto one of the antenna structures doing a selfie (I am so afraid of heights I had to go into the other room and lay down until he got down -- meanwhile I am screaming back towards the computer room for him to get down off of there). After he got down, he walked past DUGA 1. On the ground was a bunch of the same types of antennas he had stood on. They were falling off of the structure. Then the Ukranian military came after them and they had to run.
Cell phones don't operate on low frequencies. WiFi routers don't operate on high frequencies. They both operate on ultra high frequencies, or UHF.
Your radio frequencies are a bit confused, Simon. High Frequency Radio, also known as Shortwave Radio, is indeed the Band from 3 to 30 MHz, but your cellphone runs on Ultra High Frequency, UHF, which is from 300 to 3,000 MHz, and your router can have a bandwidth in that range. But the wifi itself runs on 2,400 MHz, 5,200 MHz (2.4 GHz, 5.2 GHz) or even higher. This is near to Super High Frequency, SHF, which is split into smaller segments, such as L Band, Ku Band, X Band, Ka Band on so on. SHF is from 3,000 MHz to 30,000 MHz. (Satellite TV in the West runs at X Band, around 11 to 12 GHz, and Russian Molniya TV satellites are above 3 GHz.)
LOS Radar tends to run at similar frequencies, often above 8GHz for civilian systems, which gives a good compromise between resolution and Radar pulse power capability. At 10 GHz, wavelength is 3 cms, and that can resolve objects clearly which are 30 cms (about 12") across or larger. In practice, a rule of 10 tines wavelength is the generally accepted good resolution limit. A reflective object of about 2 wavelengths across can be detected, in theory, but positional accuracy and sensitivity are very limited at that point. So a 3 cms wavelength with show faint reflections from objects which have a cross section of about 10 cms (4 inches). Military aircraft and missile systems often use higher frequencies for better resolution of small projectiles. Roadside Doppler Radar systems for traffic detection often run at around 58 GHz, and are fairly short range because the signal is absorbed relatively quickly by our atmosphere.
OTH Radar using, say, 10 MHz, has a wavelength of 30 metres (100 feet), and can only resolve clearly objects with a Radar cross section of 300 Metres; the size of an oil tanker. The smallest object it can hope to detect might have a Radar cross section of about the size of a large non-stealth bomber or an airliner, such as an A380. But the maximum useable frequency, and therefore the resolution of smaller targets, might be limited to as low as 6 MHz because of ionospheric and atmospheric conditions, which vary quickly, as anyone who has tried to listen to long distance Shortwave radio can tell you.
The soviets used also the 27 MHz band (CB) and the properties were a litle more favorable during day, at that time....
I have been waiting for someone to cover this topic properly for years! Finally! :D
I've seen it in person, it's really hard to visualise how tall and long it is just from pictures it is an absolute marvel
@Eldorado-uz1ld It is not a marvel. It is a total disaster. They wasted money on useless projects like this one while making people live if not in poverty then in low middle class conditions. Very low middle class I would say.
During the late 90's when I was starting to get into computers as a kid, I got a 5.1 Logitech speaker system. Placing the rear satellites on home built wooden pillars, I ran the cables out to those speakers as well.
At first I just noticed random static at times. But, this being the 90's with phones and god knows what causing interference, I didn't think much of it. Then I started to notice that if I started to get the static, and then sat _very_ still, I could hear radio! Not Swedish radio as I would expect though, but Russian, Finnish, German...
Sometimes I found an awkward position to sit in where it would get through quite clear.
Turns out the cables to my satellite speakers were acting as antennas, and I was capturing radio broadcasts from around the world at absolutely terrible quality. Good times!
Terry Pratchett was inspired by the Duga radar to put something called The Woodpecker into his novel Going Postal, which disabled communications towers on the klacks network
Love you Simon! Keep up the great work bro!!
They still have a few running numbers stations. Some say they or at least one is a dead key switch.
That’s concerning… as a guy who works on all kinds of electronics, they spontaneously fail way too often to trust to not randomly launch terra tons of nukes in a moment over a bum capacitor 😬
this and number stations are probably the 2 freakiest things i've ever heard in terms of radio sounds
The acronym DEW comes to mind.
Distant Early Warning
.. or
Directed Energy Weapon
... or both?
Both and much much more.
Great vid, from the good ol' days of triangulation and tesla dew's.
Now do one on phased arrays, what could be done if you had let's say 40.000 emittors in a parabolic pattern. In orbit. Combined output, accuracy etc..
🤘😆
Sidenote.
Reactor 1 was built simultaniously and with the specs to run the "radar".
The woodpecker sounds like early burst communication on the side..
But it was so versatile it's still totally classified
Another great video by Simon. Just one very rare mistake. Cellular telephone calls don't involve low frequencies. The oldest 2g or Second Generation legacy frequencies were about 600 mhz to 2100mhz. As demands for cell services worldwide has evolved, bandwidth in increasingly higher frequencies has been utilized. The lowest frequencies being used today, "HF" or high frequency go down to about 2mhz. (The HF bands are the ones used to transmit globally). The higher bands that Fifth Generation, 5G have expanded into are the highest frequencies, traditionally used for radar. The highest, millimeter wave are 24-53 ghz, travel the shortest distance.
Saw what you did there at the end, nicely done.
I'd love to visit the Duga Radar, there's something very cool about such a huge structure like that just stuck in the middle of nature.
About as cool as a niece of metal in your eye. An eyesore in the middle of natural beauty.
Voice calls on cell phones are still transmitted over high-frequency signals. Digital compression codecs just cram the signal down to a lower bitrate so more calls can be handled over the same cell tower beam
FALSE There is no HF in cell tower.
You're right, it's all Ultra-High Frequency
I think it was RotorRiot on youtube that had fvp racing clones flying around the antenea, def some cool footage.
Very interesting video and excellent research and writing, as always 😊❤❤
Ahhh, one of my favorite maps on COD CW Zombies.
I drove from kiev airport traveling to do charity work in belarus and we saw the duga radar in the distance its only about 3/4 km from the chernobyl power plant. the radar is huge, we could see it we rekoned from about 8/9 kms away
Kyiv, not Kiev.
@@BlutoandCowomp womp
Love the video. Minor correction, cell phones and WiFi tend to be UHF or SHF, not HF.
Loved the ending! Thanks for sharing.
I remember this well, I was just getting into amature radio when it all kicked off and all the excitement it created.
12:03 Duga means Rainbow in Croatian
rainbow is rajduha in ukranian/russian
I was there in June 2017, it's in impressive structure in person.
HF/SW/MW are still used to some degree and I'm pretty sure you can still sometimes hear the woodpecker. I might be wrong on that, but it has a label in the frequency spectrum of the online radio I use to listen to radio traffic in Europe lol. There are 2 other Russian signals that might also be interesting to you... the "Buzzer" and the "Stalingrad Ticking Clock." Ringway Manchester has some great videos about radios and odd signals. It might be a fun idea to do a collab with him about HF/SW radio.
I knew I'd see another fan here in the comments somewhere.
That guy makes some really in depth content that I enjoy even if I don't always fully understand. Ringway is how I know about the woodpecker myself. I've really been thinking about venturing into experimentation because of his videos alone 😂
I'm a serial hobbyist that's been in search of a new one for a year or two.
@@goosenotmaverick1156 Radio can be a great hobby but it can also seem rather discouraging in the early days when a tiny little mistake makes ya get zero results or such. This might sound weird, but if you're looking for a new hobby, you might want to try journalling first. Journalling can be a great hobby on its own, but it also pairs really well with some other hobbies including radio. It's a great way of documenting your progress and will get you in the habit of writing down interesting frequencies you find lol.
@little-wytch I'm an electrician so the odd disappointment and such isn't new to me. I enjoy troubleshooting so that's why I thought it might be a good hobby. But, I have been told more than once about Journaling (not specifically in relation to radio, but as a hobby) more than once. Maybe it's time to take you folks up on that advice, if I've gotten it more than one place I assume it's probably a good idea.
Thank you for your time and reply, I appreciate it and the honesty about the hobby. It's that kind of thing I need to have as well as the positives before I jump in.
I'm coming from aquariums and plants as a hobby. Documenting testing results and such like that a little, but not as much as I probably should have. It seems I need to get better at that first. Thanks! I'm watching a ringway video right now, I paused to read your reply actually haha.
@@goosenotmaverick1156not all SDRs cover full SW, some are just amateur bands. Many have MW, and some even have LF, famously the "Twente WebSDR" in the Netherlands, which can accommodate dozens of simultaneous listeners (most SDRs do about 4).
@@goosenotmaverick1156Learn what the HF international broadcast bands are so you can scan effectively. Learn about utility and amateur too, there are digital AM, slow scan tv, weather fax, shipping teletype, and other modes in use and SDRs have choices to reconfigure to decode these.
The loss of many shortwave broadcasters since the 80s is balanced out somewhat now by being able to DX from anywhere. Have fun!
Even if it is now obsolete, you cant deny this makes kickass ambient wordbuilding for any Stalker Game
From 1976 until 1982 l worked for a letter agency and became aware of this plus some Russian, East German and Chinese numbers stations. I bought a short wave radio at a yards sale. At this time particularly on rainy or overcast nights l could get a couple different numbers stations. I'd let my friends listen and they'd freak when they hear a Russia or Chinese person, frequently a woman chanting (reading numbers) they would freak out. I'd tell them the Woodpecker was aliens
What where a majorty of the codes for just that? Luke a radio ingima machine? Also, I didn't know china had a number mschine
Only the receiver is shown everywhere pretty sad there is nothing on the transmitter!
I have been obsessed with the Duga ever since I seen it online when I was a kid. I have watched every video on RUclips I can find about it. And read many websites. I would love to go look at it in person
If you really want to know, read some of what Thomas Bearden wrote about it.
Thanks for sharing.
I was there in 2020 on a tour of Chernobyl- best memory of my life 🔥
I remember hearing the Russian Woodpecker on my CB radio back in the 80s. I never could figure out what it was. Just a side note is that this radar is located not far from Chernobyl nuclear plant, so it probably got its power from there
I went to Chernobyl in 2012 and the Duga Radar was off limits back then. We could see it from where we stood not far from the power plant, but it was a spec on the horizon from there.
5:20 - Chapter 1 - The russian woodpecker
10:30 - Chapter 2 - LOS vs OTH
14:35 - Chapter 3 - The problems with OTH DUGA
I was here in 2019. Truly remarkable structure
Cool video. You should do one on Australia's JORN OTH radar.
The Channel Chernobyl Family has a great video on the Duga Radar, including the computer systems used for operating it.
They look weird too, like a row of giant dandelions! 😅 (Thumbnail)
Thanks for the video
At 11:25 I believe that you mis-spoke. Low frequency radio waves bounce off of the ionosphere whereas high frequencies go through the ionosphere. This is why we talk to satellites and space craft with VHF and higher. de VA3NIE
You might have been caught up in the old frequency nomenclature where there is Low and High frequencies or HF radio from 1.8 - 30 MHz was mainly used which are bounced off of the ionosphere but then experiments were made with even higher frequencies and once you get to over 50MHz there is little bouncing off of the ionosphere.
Yes, the nomenclature gets confusing.
fans of STALKER know this place well
That structure might form the basis of a nice rollercoaster.
It could be used to calculate the humidity of the air at different heights, to carry out experiments with water vapor at different heights, to calculate the speed of sound at different temperatures, to calculate the particles in the air, the atmospheric conditions, and instead the great homeland has not looked in the face of anyone and has the best scientists around the world
You guys got your radio wave properties backwards, lower freqs dont penetrate well but bounce off the ionisphere. Higher freqs penetrate better but are shorter range and los.
Cellphones are in the gigahertz range while radios typically dont go higher than 900 megahertz or so (less than 1 Ghz).
A bit of a mistake Simon. High frequencies pass through the ionosphere, low frequencies bounce off. Also this bouncing or skipping varies greatly with atmospheric conditions, solar activity etc.
Simons camera seems a bit washed out for this video, no? wonder if this was the intent or if someone forgot to calibrate
I hated that area in Warzone. Always have a ton of campers perched atop that damn thing. 😂
Woodpecker is SIGINT installation for monitoring ionosphere. Looks wild but honestly it's just a big ass antennae array to check air out my dudes
Great video
*"The numbers mason! What do they mean?!"*
I've been there and saw it in person. 😊
Simon needs to get with @RingwayManchester, he's a gold mine of data and Simon is Mister Presentstion Magic, the two together is like peanutbutter and caramel inside chocolate.
Second person mentioning a collab. I agree! Might be a good outcome from that
Hey I've seen this before! Reminds me of Black Ops: Cold War zombies as one of the Outbreak areas has this exact same structure or nearly identical.
We called the BMEWS "bemuse".
I used to love listening to the woodpecker, whilst doing my homework
it would be cool to see it in person, once that disagreement is over
I visited the Duga Radar back in 2017 when also visiting Chernobyl Powerplant.. What an impressive structure..
Were you shinning in the dark after that visit ?😊
@@jplacido9999 Not more than normal 🤩🤩🤩
What a good movie prop though
My Dad used to record it and then play it back to them in his amateur radio days. 😅
Probably just as radioactive as that ferris wheel in Pripyat
I seem to recall reading years ago that the Chernobyl nuclear plant was built to power Duga-1. No idea if that was actually correct.
I always find it amusing when people tell stories like this and feel the need to add dramatic affect for people who don't understand how such things work by pointing out that it was such the mystery of where radio waves were coming from. "Didn't know where it came from" can be directly translated into "The Russians (or whoever) didn't do a press release stating the address of the transmitter so we had to turn on a couple direction finders for a second."
I remeber the woodpecker, used to listen to Radio Luxembourg, but sometimes the Russians showed up, not a big deal
It was a digital device, according to an article, and very complicated.
I had a "ghetto blaster" that I bought in about 1987 that had shortwave capability. I was fascinated that I could listen to radio stations all around the world, including "Radio Budapest", an English-language Warsaw-Pact propaganda station.
But I remember this damn noise - which I always thought sounds more like a helicopter - that would come in over top of things, whatever they were. It would show up, move away, etc. It wasn't until many years later that I learned what it was.
Hey Simon, I think you meant gigs hertz when you were talking about WiFi and cell towers.