#duga-3

Duga-3, The Russian Woodpecker

The Playboy Channel is a short sound collage/spoken word piece by the Bay Area avant-garde band Negativland from their famed 1987 album Escape From Noise. In it, band member David “Weatherman” Willis describes a hypothetical situation in which the Playboy Channel is jammed by a signal similar to the Russian Woodpecker.

The Russian Woodpecker, officially known as Duga-3 or Steel Yard, was a disturbingly powerful 10Hz shortwave signal that broadcasted from Kiev Oblast in the former Soviet Union. Its official purpose was to serve as a radar system, even though before the USSR collapsed, theories floated around that it was a Soviet mind control tactic. Blame McCarthyism for that, I guess. Anyway, the radar produced a strange tapping sound as a byproduct, and the signal was so powerful that it interrupted broadcasts on American airwaves. In fact, by the 1980s most analog TV stations had installed measures to block the Woodpecker from interrupting them.

"The Russian Woodpecker was a notorious Soviet radio signal that could be sporadically heard on the shortwave radio bands worldwide between July 1976 and December 1989. It sounded like a sharp, repetitive tapping noise at 10 Hz,[1] giving rise to the "Woodpecker" name. The random frequency hops disrupted legitimate broadcast, amateur radio, commercial aviation communications, utility transmissions, and resulted in thousands of complaints by many countries worldwide. Because of its extremely high power output (over 10 MW in some cases), the signal became such a nuisance that some receivers such as amateur radios and televisions actually began including 'Woodpecker Blankers' in their design.

The mysterious and unclaimed signal was a source for much speculation, giving rise to theories such as Soviet mind control and weather control. However, after careful study, many experts and amateur radio hobbyists long believed it to be that of an extremely powerful 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 (Russian: Дуга-3)[2] system, part of the Soviet ABM early-warning network. NATO military intelligence had photographed the system and given it the NATO reporting name Steel Yard."

Duga-3 Antenna System

Duga-3, situated near Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, was a Soviet experimental over-the-horizon radar system developed for the Soviet Anti-Ballistic-Missile early warning network and operated from 1976 to 1989.