The Russian Woodpecker of Chernobyl: How To See Over The Horizon
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- Опубликовано: 6 сен 2024
- tomscott.com - / tomscott - Thanks to Ashley Shepherd for the drone footage - see the full video on his channel here: • 4K Drone Footage from ...
This is the Duga-3 array, inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. It's an incredible piece of Soviet engineering, capable of sending radar pulses so powerful they could see over the horizon. Which, when you think about it, is more complicated than it might initially appear...
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I've been there myself, and I can't stress enough how enormous the sheer size of this build is. You have to see it for yourself
Damn I think Putin read this
I don't think I am going there anytime soon.
I've seen bigger
I don't know why but I was expecting a mutated woodpecker endemic to chernobyl...
Same.
Same
same
A woodpecker that screams in russian
Weren't we all
Considering the final sentence in this video makes me think we're in one of the few parallel universes where humanity did survive and most of the others are nuclear wastelands. A few others have sentient ducks.
By a few do you mean an infinitely many universes with sentient ducks and an infinitely many universes with no sentient ducks.
You watch kurzgesagt? Good man.
Joe Alt but the infinitely many universes with sentient ducks are fewer than the infinitely many universes without sentient ducks
LucAs Bune arithmetic with Infinitys doesn't work.
***** or are they more sentient, so much so we can't detect they level of sentient, like it being at level 9,001
ooohhh I get it, radio active
This array needed massive power. It got it from Chernobyl, only a few hours away by foot through the woods. It is visible from the abandoned city of Pripyat.
@@thomashughes_teh So thats why there was a nuclear reactor thausands of km from anything that would need that much power
@@lukakresoja5297 Northern Ukraine is quite populous. In fact, all of Ukraine is populous. Ukraine has over 40 million people! Chernobyl was supposed to be the futuristic, ideal city for the young academic elite. That, and the Duga-3, needed that much power.
What if we kissed on the Duga-3 Array in Chernobyl!?!?!?! 😂🤣😂🤣😍😋😍🤣😂😎😎
Ba dum tss
Wasn't all for nothing. If they built it, used it, and everyone knew they had it; everyone would have just thought 'there's no point firing at them coz they will instantly know' and probably therefore didn't bother. Prevention through discouragement.
The "cold" part of cold war.
especially considering that even if they wouldn't react in time to prevent the impact, they'd still shove the "dead hand" up the rest of the world's ass
A - very good point.
B - excellent use of punctuation🙂
_Si vis pacem, para bellum_
That is until “mutually assured destruction” was seen as acceptable to some. Somehow
Sometimes my wifi drops out at the bottom of the garden. Would this help?
You could use it but you'd need a lot more powerful of a transmitter as well as a solution to the incredible amount of noise.
You probably could use something like this on a much smaller scale though
Joshua Mcateer you probably would need a bit more bandwith
r/whoosh
Yes I think it would be about strong enough. Just out of curiosity what is your password, btw?
This place is actually really interesting (Its designation is actually Duga 1), well Duga is more interesting (Located in the south of Ukraine) because it is semi-operational (yes somebody resored it), then there is the other one (Duga 2) (I forget where it is). Each installation had a transmiter and a reciver (usually 20-60 km away from each other) they had 3 so you could trangulate the missile and confrim that one wasnt malfuntioning. There were reports of a woodpeckeer signal as eraly as 1963 on a higher frequency.
Woa
Immediate recommended video after some obscure soundclip video of the DUGA
Same
2:16 - Scott: Somehow, despite everything, humanity got through the Cold War
Pippin: What about Second Cold War?
*Putin
@@nodell8729 **Pippin
@@nodell8729*biden
Tom, you wrote a great narrative for this and delivered it with just the right tone. I hope you're somewhere making documentary film or working as a broadcast journalist. We really enjoyed watching this, thank you.
Pfft he is making way more money, has way more creative freedom and recognition doing work on youtube than working in traditional broadcast.
you should know that he's been publishing regularly to this day
"On your feet comrade, Are you ready for a little Retribution?"
Objective: Eliminate your former team
For the Motherland!
Incredible drone footage!
Was thinking the same thing - wow.
It's illegal tho
There are some videos of people climbing it on youtube.
@@GewelReal what
@@GewelReal You're illegal.
I remember picking this up many times on my amateur radio equipment in the 80s!
Back in the day I used to hear that annoying thing on shortwave radio, though I knew very little about it then. Only sometime this century did I learn what it looked like, where it was exactly and that it had an enormous output of 10 megawatts.
By 1980, when I was studying the ionosphere using a radar of much lower power but on the same frequencies, we heard it regularly.
It was widely conjectured that the most likely explanation was that it was over the horizon radar.
Other guesses at the time were Soviet mind control, and more extreme conspiracy ideas...
The last sentence of this video kinda be hittin different now...
I wonder if this (or one similar) was the inspiration behind the 'fence' in the Divergent films.
This radar array was used as inspiration for the film.
news.moviefone.com/2014/03/13/divergent-production-designer-diary/
The wall is basically identical just copied end to end
I find the design very interesting. It looks like a large dipole array. Processing the signal from something like that is hard with computers from the seventies or even early eighties. Especially in near real-time.
I would be very interested in how it exactly worked.
Same. Did you notice those transmission lines? They look like steam pipe! I want to see one of the elements up close and have explained to me why that particular design. I want to see the transmitter room! There is that one huge AM station up by canada where the antenna is just miles of cables strung up on poles. The amps for that one is cool! I love radio. I want to go get my advanced license. wish i could get a job with that. or is there somthing i dont know and thats exactly what i should do?
@@Wtfinc I'd assume it's still classified. At least I never stumbled upon any technical details.
@@Wtfinc Bear in mind this is NOT the transmitter. That was demolished. This is the receiver.
This was the third of three, the second one in Ukraine has been partially restored, it's really something to see
Processing was possibly entirely mechanical. Imagine a 300m deep basement with a gigantic pendulum attached to the signal array.
Russian speaker here. It's pronounced Dugá. Accent on the a. Duga (Дуга) means "arc".
***** That doesn't look like IPA. Do you mean /duˈgɑː/?
Steve Wood The Russian pronunciation is /dʊˈɡa/.
+Evelyn it's not if you know even a bit of language. Using dUga instead of dugA in Russian sentence stand out way too much tonally
*necroposting inbound* there was never a "Duga-3". There was "Duga", "Duga-1" and "Duga-2". This one is Duga-1 (the word means Arc is anyone is interested)
Great piece! I actually recall hearing this over the horizon radar in the 80s way down their in Johannesburg, very annoying and quite spooky I recall. I have a suggestion too - look into "number stations" - very mysteriously but part of the cold war I believe and could be hear by us CB / Short wave enthusiasts in the 80s - good times!
That last line may not have aged as well as we hoped unfortunately.
Pretty cool how much stuff was built near this little town.
+ויאמר סבבה! there was a lot of "small not important" towns in USSR that had strategic value
+Миша Шевченко well yeah put factory x in Russian village x and the US won't think of bombing it so the warmachine can keep on living
devastator5042 exactly
This station is a true masterpiece of engineering.
The woodpecker and other over the horizon radars (the US had several) weren't just one voice channel wide. they could wipe out entire ranges of shortwave bandwidth. OTH radar made life miserable for all the users of the shortwave bands. Not just militaries around the world, but shipping and boating, Amateur Radio operators, shortwave listeners, even diplomatic communication used shortwave. Luckily shortwave is slowly converting over to digital communication that is less susceptible to interference.
I remember the woodpecker well from shortwave listening when I was in high school.
Modern over-the-horizon radar (like the U.S. Navy stuff around the Gulf of Mexico) sounds more like a raspberry. :-)
silent because raspberries don't make any sound? Or is there something I don't know about raspberries?
@@kusalg a raspberry is the name given to a noise that babies often make when they put their tongue out with their lips closed and blow air
I was in the RAF as an Avionics Technician, on Chinooks and Puma's performing ARI functional checks, 1986 - 1988, Gutersloh. Heard these everytime.
But it made a nice wall in that Insurgent movie.
@Nathaniel12345678910 Don't know, I just remembered seeing it in the movie and wondering how much of it was CGI. I didn't know it was real until I saw this video.
The series:
Insurgent
Divergent
Detergent (it was Allegiant but Detergent is the better name)
@@waity5856 Actually.. Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant are the names, and the order, of the these movies..
@@genelomas332 Ah, ok
Years before it had become the stuff of Coast to Coast AM and all that, I routinely heard it surfing the short wave dial on my dad's Tanberg reciever.
I never saw that in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games! :(
Riotlight Get out of here, Stalker!
Riotlight it's actually the inspiration for the brainscorcher
Riotlight Ever played Clear Sky? There's a miniaturized version of it there.
Mark Dano
Oh, actually i havent played that one!
Riotlight Many would say that you shouldn't, it was alright. It wasn't as bad as many other games by other devs but it wasn't the strongest of the three S.T.A.L.KK.E.R. games.
Up until now
When I first saw this in the drone footage I thought for a second that it was some crazy wall of turbine blades, but then I realized it had to be an antenna array of some sort. Glad to see a video about it!
Imagine being pulled all the way out here so Perseus could detonate those nukes
Wow. That's a fairly impressive structure.
So this monstrosity was the cheaper option then?
Then satellites? Much MUCH cheaper. A hunk of steel like this, massive as it looks, costs next to nothing, compared to launching something into space.
Well, not any more, but back in the sixties, yes.
It actually cost twice as much as the neighbouring nuclear power plant. Highly recommend Chad Garcia's 2015 film The Russian Woodpecker, if you'd like some more details on it, straight from the source. People that actually worked there.
Plamen Dobrev Still cheaper
Ye this still cost big money, but building satellites and launching them to space was still way more expensive, atleast back then.
Its interesting how Soviets went their own way of doing "shortcuts" and going for things that USA/west never would have, but then again they kind of had to, they could not compete against USA on many factors.....unfortunately in case of their nuclear power plants and RMBK reactors that also meant compromising safety....
Hmm the brain scorcher is looking nice this time of year.
That thing and it's hunger for energy was the reason for building a nuclear power plant in close vicinity.
Bell betrays his team here
The radio filters being nicknamed "Moscow mufflers" absolutely does it for me
What an interesting and topical video. Thanks Tom for your incredible, maybe unintentional, foresight
Great stuff. You're onto something great with these vids - informative, interesting, relevant and pitched in layman's terms. Keep up the great work and thanks for sharing.
doppler radars can be tricked by flying perpendicular and below the horizon to the radar dish, which means you have no relative motion and blend in with the ground clutter.
not very useful for a nuclear missile (because it won't get anywhere if it's not heading towards it's target, duh) but the tactic is useful for avoiding radar guided missiles in aerial combat. I believe it's called "notching".
00:30 Powerful enough is only part of it and is nothing to do with it bouncing off the ionosphere. A traditional radar will not work over the horizon however powerful. That's because since invented in WW2 radar has used microwave frequencies.
To bounce off the ionosphere you need to use much lower frequencies, which confusingly are called "High Frequency" for historical reasons. Ordinary short wave radio goes over the horizon for this reason: and a 1kW ham radio rig will easily talk to anywhere when the ionosphere is cooperating.
The power is needed in order for the radar receiver to detect the return signal. It has to overcome the dissipation due to multiple bounces off the ionosphere but that is trivial compared to the fact that radar suffers a 1/d^4 effect, as the signal is reduced by a factor of distance squared in both directions.
The power and the frequency are needed for different reasons
To
I like how you say "Duga". you need to stress the other syllable.
visiting there is on my bucket list :)
Well that last statement aged well
I can't believe shiey climbed that thing
This video ending aged like fine milk
(1:40) Would Soviet Union really measure missiles in miles per second? That sounds odd.
They would be moving Miles Per Sec so it isnt odd
@@pabloschrute Yes, but they would measure it in kilometers per second or meters per second, not miles ;-)
There is a similarly sized array like this in South East Turkey near Diyabakir, owned by the Americans, I used to get to visit the base regularly for social events, they even had their own bowling alley :) iirc it was called Prinçlik (or Inçlik, I always got them confused)
Haha that aged well Tom :) "humanity got through the cold war" :)
feels alot different in 2022
Amazing footage yet all I see is Brain Scorcher.
DaveP1991 Get out of here, Stalker!
* OH . C Y K A *
Humanity got through the cold war. And here we are in 2022 deciding to have another go.
The Russian Woodpecker reminds me of and looks like the wall from Divergent.
reminds me of the wall from Divergent.
This is what said wall was based on
Wow. I've only seen that movie once a long time ago, hated it and promptly forgotten it. But this was exactly what I thought while watching this video!
that is literally what it is. it was the thing that was filmed.
www.imdb.com/title/tt1840309/locations They literally filmed the wall here
That’s because it actually is!
i can still hear this signal in my radio!
The drone footage was cool, but I noticed a bit of a rolling shutter effect happening. Try getting a better shock absorbing mount for the drone's camera. :-)
It is worth mentioning, this is the receiver. The transmitter is in Liubech-1.
That part about "Moscow Mufflers" piqued my interest, I could watch an episode all about that
I never knew of the "Russian woodpecker". Brilliant show, interesting facts as usual. Cheers!
I was hoping you would do a video on Duga-3 while you are there. Amazing stuff. :)
Oh I’ve seen that in PUBG I thought it was power transporter in the Military base
This is also in the bad ending on COD BO CW
"Duga" translates as a "bow", like, not the weapon, but the curved line.
"Arc", I believe, is a better term.
Excellent.
Bionerd23 has a video of inside the place, with remains of the computer systems.
Been there, outstanding piece of engineering...
"Humanity got through the Cold War" - naaah, not really.
I was in ASA in the 70s and used to intercept and do sig analysis on this target, Elint to us
and what do you need to powerful such an array? how about a Nuclar power station
Videos like this is why I’m a proud follower of Tom Scott!
"Somehow, humanity got through the Cold War."
I wouldn't be so sure of that, 7-year-ago Tom. Ah to be young and naive again.
Nah, he’s right, we got through it.
Cold war 2, electric boogaloo.
The RF doesn't bounce off the Ionosphere, it's refracted by the F layers and then the beam hits the ground in the target area. The beam then hits the objects and hits the ground again before it's reflected back to the ionosphere - refracted again and then received by the OTHR site. Plus, strictly speaking conventional radars can see out to about 200 to 250 nautical miles, but the signal is of course affected by the curvature of the Earth. What an OTHR can do is see far beyond a regular air defence radar's range and also doesn't suffer from the curvature issue.
A specialist radar such as the one used at Fylingdales and other BMEWS sites can see beyond 250nm but it still suffers from the curvature problem - hence why OTHRs are used in certain countries.
The Radars I worked on in the Army were a half megawatt or 5 megawatts (AN/FPS-71), and there was a 10 megawatt HIPAR. But those were peak pulse power. The woodpecker put out high pulse power but the average power was lower.
And here we are in another cold war, just a few years after this video was published..
The obvious dipole elements are unlike anything I've seen. Would love to see some commentary on that from an antenna expert.
OTHR is still a valid technology in use at various locations
So this is the place Bell brought Adler
Satellites were hard to put up in the 1970’s?
Put them there? Not really. The hard part is to launch a constellation of them and make it reliable.
Been here before and it truly is enormous. A great feat of engineering. But how did it differentiate between a missile and an aeroplane? Speed?
Exactly, Transcontinental missiles would be traveling far faster than any plane. Thus the doppler shift would be greater. I'm sure they had filters for filtering out signals that didn't cross a certain speed threshold.
Great video and explanation.
Ive been waatching a lot of your videos - following this one Id love to see one on number stations
Super well shot, this video hits different post "special military operation"
That the wall from Divergent
I should replay Clear Sky someday. I played it when it was quite buggy unfortunately.
It looks like the wall in Divergence, although it's probably the opposite.
This radar array was actually the inspiration for the wall in Divergent
Alexandre Simoneau It actually is.
And woopdie dooo, now we're back into it!
No. Russia's economy is about the same size as The Netherland's.
That is some bad ass camera action up there! :O
Side on it looks a bit like rollercoaster scaffolding. I wonder if it can be repurposed?
If this is Duga-3, and the matching one is 60km away, and the zone is only 30km, what's Duga-1, which is in the zone?
The sister base was dismantled for scrap. This one was left in place on acount of the difficulty of moving it and the fact irradiated steel was of no commercial value. A small segment of the Duga 3 was dismantled before the project was abandoned.
You don't need to be in "the zone" to have been affected by the fallout. The cloud that billowed out of Chernobyl spread across most of northern Europe. The radar station would have been at least as contaminated as, say, the farm animals of Scandinavia and north England, seeing as it's basically a big ol' sieve poking up towards the heavens. And outdoor metalwork, from bicycles on up, that gets a serious dose of neutron activation remains radioactive and dangerous to spend extended periods near to (or astride, or inside) for a good long time.
The evacuation was partly because the town itself bore the brunt of the initial localised fallout and irradiation, partly because they had no idea just how bad things might get and if the other reactors might also blow, partly to get the civilians out of the way of the militarised cleanup operation, and partly as a cover up exercise that rapidly fell apart. Plus if you have something like that which you _really_ don't want unauthorised randoms getting too close to or even interfering with, a 30km radius (I presume it's a radius and not a diameter; this would also mean there's a slim chance that there could be two radar stations 60km apart that are both *just* inside the zone) gives you a good chance of spotting them on the approach or at least picking them up on their way back out. It's essentially a day's walk in both directions, especially if you're moving off-road.
C'mon Bell!
I well remember this as an SWL back in the 70s. The Cold War produced all kinds of creepy radio, some of which is still out thére. (K station, anyone?)
An interesting antenna array!
Going there tomorrow! Very excited.
For a minute I thought you were saying they were detecting the blue-shifting of the radio waves bouncing off of an incoming object. I was extremely impressed for a minute.
Then I realized they could just look at the ratatatat pattern for frequency shifts. Now I'm just moderately impressed.
Blue shift doesn't occur in sound waves, you meant compression though I assume, as blue shift would be correct if it was EM radiation
Robert Backhaus They're not looking for blueshifting. Their equipment probably isn't NEARLY sensitive enough for that. Instead, they're looking at the structure of the signal to detect changes in its length. It's much easier that way.
LHommeDeCave Radio waves ARE electromagnetic radiation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_wave
Yeah my mistake, I misunderstood
I uh... think you gotta update this video...
That is one ugly Goliath of a construction. Very Soviet.
That's because Russians build for purpose and not looks
charlichigo HAARP is about the same size...
daniel117100 On principle of the fact that the public ownership of the means of production necessarily leads to economic ruin due to the inability to calculate, and led to more deaths than any institution in the world, I wouldn't frame anything about the Soviets or their work in a positive light. The Russian people, on the other hand, I like them rather a lot.
To me, it's like you're saying "Stalin slaughtered with good intentions," while probably true, in some very limited capacity due to the relationship of the workers with their overlords, it conveys no merit to the things. Generally, Soviet constructions functioned just about as well as they looked.
Jaedrik Cobalt Ever seen the Monty Python sketch "What have the romans ever done for us!?".... You remind me of that but with the Soviets, all they ever gave us were; space travel, open heart surgery, satellites, the principle of lasers and (of course) Tetris- Off the top of my head, there are obviously more.
You may hate their politics, but we may not even be having this little chat without their inventions.
So much pathetic Russian butt licking going on..
Think what you want, the Soviet Union sucked balls at almost everything. "function over form".. shame they have neither anymore.
At 0:22 there is a small black streek on the screen on the top left side, is that an effect of radiation on the camera or does anyone have the explanation?
I wonder how this differs from the United States' BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System).
I remember learning about Signals Intelligence a long time ago they told us we'd probably pick up the woodpecker at some point
Nice camera work
Little did you know, my friend.