Chornobyl-2 "Russian Woodpecker" - OTH Radar of type "DUGA-1"

Ukraine / Kyyivska / Prypyat /
 radar station, abandoned / shut down, dangerous place / area, closed / former military, early warning radar
The city Chornobyl-2 is located northwest of the small town of Chornobyl in Polissia region of Ukraine, but it is impossible to find on any topographical map. Exploring the maps, you are likely to find a symbol for a children's boarding house, or a dotted line of forest roads on a place of accommodation of the town, but no reference to urban and technical buildings. In the USSR, they were able to hide a secret, even more so if it was a military secret.
Was a secret military soviet over-the-horizon radar base that could detect Soviet-bound rocket launches in the United States. Only two of them existed in the whole USSR, the second being near the city of Komsomolsk(or Nikolaevsk)-na-Amure.
After the reactor explosion, the installation received extensive amount of radioactive pollution and was switched off and abandoned. Some of the electronic equipment was transferred to the Nikolaevsk-na-Amure base, and other parts were looted.

This is the receiver installation; the transmitting aerial was 60 kilometers away in Lubech, Ukraine (also known as "Rozsudiv"). The transmitting aerial was destroyed in the late 1990s, disassembled and sold as scrap metal.

Now, in mid-2007, this antenna aerial is being prepared for disassembly and scrapping. It is not possible to visit this antenna.

On Russian high quality 'genshtabs' maps there's a mark that it's a Young Pioneer (Scout) Camp:
nav.lom.name/maps_scan/M36/100k/100k--m36-025.gif

Here are some "terrestrial" pictures of the giant antenna array:
http:// www.flickr.com/photos/39169114@N00/

Google panorama: goo.gl/maps/Y4ZUFStn9q1i4qeC8
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Woodpecker
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:   51°18'15"N   30°3'58"E

Comments

  • Cheers, I always wondered what that place was, I orignally thought it was a bunker, (Has two vent like things in the lower part). Some people went as far as to call it Chernobyl-2 or something, saying it had some involvment with the Power Plant.
  • It was a high power radar and it consumed a lot of electric power (the involvment was the the power line from the power plant to the radar station :-)
  • We (a delegation which was officially granted high-level permission to visit the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone yesterday, 27th October 2007) could also see the antenna installation from a considerable distance. About the same image as in pripyat.com/ru/internet-photo/chernobyl 2/1/11138.html. Being a radio amateur and having suffered from the "woodpecker" I was, of course, very interested to get a closer look. However, even though our guides and bus driver were extremely cooperative, they did not dare to get any closer to the antenna, since that still seems to be strictly forbidden. Nevertheless, the installation apparently has not been dismantled yet, as was suggested elsewhere. On a general note, the visit to Chernobyl was extremely depressing - a heart breaking experience of the terrible consequences of nuclear power accidents.
  • Hello Walter, now the antenna aerial is disassembling and sold on metal scrap. All you can do is get so closer to antenna from the object fence. Try contact the "Chernobylinterinform" organisation for possible permission. Good luck to you!
  • i wanted to visit this
  • sooo HUGE!
  • The culture of Cold War secrecy dies hard in the former USSR. This facility wasn't merely secret, it was a top national defense site designed to detect incoming nuclear missiles, built during a time when you needed to show your "internal passport" to get on the bus to go to work and weren't allowed to leave your city of residence without official permission. Even KNOWING a foreigner, especially an American, made you a potential spy. All the people raised from childhood on these attitudes are now in various positions of authority. So even though the Cold War is over, it wouldn't be a stretch to say Russians are paranoid about foreigners. They have the world's biggest vintage tank and aircraft museum near Moscow, but you need an official escort to visit and aren't allowed to take pictures if you're a foreigner because (logically, in the Soviet mindset) Westerners are decadent, stupid and tasteless, so any Westerner who cares that much about Soviet military technology is probably an American spy.
  • Also featured in the Call of Duty: Black Ops map "Grid".
  • Show all comments
This article was last modified 3 years ago