Rick Slobodian | The SWLing Post

The mystery array

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Rick Slobodian, who seeks help solving a 22 year old mystery. Rick writes:

[Perhaps you can help me] explain this antenna….a 22 year old mystery antenna (see photo above)? What sort of antenna is this and how does it work? It’s at 49.8994 N 24.685 E near Krasne, Ukraine.

I was at this transmitter site in 1998.

Antenna switch room

I was writing articles for a number of magazines hoping to find customers for airtime and to make this site viable.

I spent all day at the site wrote extensively about EVERYTHING ELSE: the shortwave transmitters, the longwave transmitters, the shortwave antennas, the vertical long wave antennas, and the vertical MW antennas.

Longwave antenna at Krasne

HRS curtain array at Krasne

The transmitters were behemoths: Komintern Burans 500Kw 1000 Kw 1200 Kw

New 1200 Kw transmitter under construction

This antenna was over a km form the main building and they would let me go there:

I took this photo of the array as I traveled past it by train.

Its 36 towers strung in a NE SE line–over 2 km long and each tower is approximately 40 m tall.

[My hosts] were they so evasive about this antenna array yet not the rest of the site.

[There are some peculiarities:]

Do you see a feed line running along the bottom of the towers near the ground?

I do not see any tuning shacks.

Is it fed from one end or the other end or is each tower fed?

If each tower is fed, then where are the tuning shacks/phasors?

iIf it is a beverage then why so may towers and such close spacing?

Is it something completely different?

What do you think it is? How do you think it works and what would be its purpose?

Thanks for sharing, Rick! My hope is that one of the members of the Post community may be able to shed a little light on this interesting antenna array. Please comment!

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Photo from Rick’s location in Vernon, BC.

Many thanks to SWLing Post reader, Rick Slobodian, who writes to request help with the following:

I was on the beach at our lake, [where I was listening to my] Tecsun PL-606 receiver.

[On Friday, August 19, 2016 at 1800 UTC, I noted a] “beeper”: beeps at Hz repetition rate , does not appear to be data, it beeps for about a minute then there is a short data burst then beeping again for a minute or two.

This went on for over an hour.

Location of Vernon, British Columbia, Canada (click to enlarge).

[The beeping covered] all frequencies between 13400-13800 kHz. [Then on August 20, it started at] start 1745 UTC and was no longer on 3400-13800 but now on
all frequencies between 12120 -12250.

What is it? [Take a listen:]

Click here to download a recording of the beeping.

My ham radio friend says there are a network of stations that send out pings that everyone in the group transmits and everyone receives. The signal strength and phase of the rx signal is correlated at each receiver station, to direction find some unknown station.

Was there such a thing during the cold war, and is it still around? What is this system and where can I find out more about it?

Thanks for your inquiry, Rick. This is outside the scope of what I understand on the HF bands, so I hope SWLing Post readers can chime in and offer suggestions.

Please comment if you can help Rick ID this transmission!

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