[Hallicrafters] Russian Woodpeckers, Buzz-Saws and So Forth

[Woody Demitz]

The annoying airplane-like sound several of you folks have described sounds to me like classic Soviet buzz-saw jamming. It was heavily used in the 1950s-1980s to interfere with international shortwave broadcasters aimed at listeners in the Soviet Union--most often Radio Liberty, Voice of America and BBC Russian broadcasts, though minority language programs (Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Armenian, Georgian, Azerbaijani, the 3 Baltic languages, Uzbek etc) were covered as well. The buzz-saw sound was punctuated with a modulated morse i.d. every few seconds so the Soviet off-site monitoring network could direct the transmitters to the most effective frequencies and know which jamming sites were actually doing the "best" job.  Soviet jammers then were of two types: sky-wave and ground-wave.  Ground-wave jammers were set up in and around major cities to cover heavily populated areas.  Sky-wave jammers were often thousands of miles away (Central and Eastern Siberia) and it was those that were the biggest polluters of the global ether.

As a young foreign service officer at the American Embassy in Moscow (1970-72) I listened to that stuff up close and personal for three years.  The groundwave jammers' antennas were clearly visible around Moscow, with a major location being about 4 blocks from the embassy, right near the Ukraina Hotel. Later, as director of VOA's USSR broadcasting (1979-81)and VOA's Eurasia Division after the Soviet Union collapsed (1994-97) I saw it from the other side. In 1994 I traveled to 7 cities in the Russian Far East to discuss broadcast partnerships with local Russian AMs and FMs. With fewer and fewer people listening to shortwave, we were offering VOA Russian via satellite to local retransmitters. In one of those cities (Chita, just on the Chinese-Russian border) I saw my first skywave jammer and its affiliated monitoring station.  A truly massive broadcast complex, and the Russian government was offering to rent its shortwave transmitters to the highest bidding international broadcaster!

Annoying though the buzz-saw was to hams, as a jammer it was very inefficient, since the listener could often discern the message through the consistent sound. The truly nasty stuff was garbled human speech, distorted music and something that can be described as sounding like marbles rattling down a drainpipe. In spite of all this garbage in the air, much of the programming got through, because it was broadcast on multiple freqs and on multiple bands, and people were willing to tolerate poor audio quality to get the information they sought. 

If I am not mistaken, the infamous Woodpecker was a Soviet over-the-horizon radar installation located somewhere in Byelorussia, not far from the Polish border.

Woody Demitz
ex-KN4QIU, K0ODR, W4VNA and PA0SHD