Duga Radar

Lore & Background

Soviet work on over-the-horizon radar began in the late 1960s, when the early warning satellite network of the country was not well developed. An experimental system built outside Mykolaiv detected rocket launches from Baikonur Cosmodrome at 2500 km, and a prototype on the same site followed. The operational systems, built in 1972, used a transmitter and a receiver separated by about 60 km.

The installation in Ukraine was set up in two closed towns. Liubech-1 held the transmitters and Chernobyl-2 the receivers. The antenna spanned 700 m in length and 150 m in height.

Reader's Guide

The radar was extremely powerful, reaching over 10MW, and it transmitted in the shortwave bands. Listeners around the world heard it as a sharp, repetitive tapping at 10Hz and nicknamed it the Russian Woodpecker. Its frequency hops disrupted broadcasts, amateur radio and aviation communications, and drew thousands of complaints from many countries. Some receivers were even built with circuits designed to blank it out.

Because nobody claimed the signal, it fed speculation about brainwashing and weather modification experiments. Experts and radio hobbyists recognised from its transmission pattern that it was a radar, and triangulation traced it to Ukraine. NATO gave it the reporting name STEEL WORK or STEEL YARD.

Did You Know?

• Radio amateurs were already calling a similar signal the Russian Woodpecker as early as 1963.
• Two operational radars were deployed, the other one in eastern Siberia.