Fake Traffic Network

Status: inactive

Last known transmission: March 2021

This network was a group of M14, E06, and G06 schedules, all transmitted from the Smolensk transmitter site, that sent traffic of dubious value. It was active from the early 2000s until 2021. With the end of 2019, its Smolensk facility saw a significant downsize, ending all other operations. Then this network's transmissions were temporarily discontinued after November 14, 2020, before making a short reappearance in February 2021 for about a month, and getting finally retired in March 2021.

This network is typically seen with the same messages being sent for years at a time. Sometimes these messages are even shared and reused verbatim across the different schedules of the network. Sometimes only a part of the message contents is reused from before, for example when a known message gets extended. Until the mid 2010s, the messages sent across the network had fixed group counts, and featured non-random number sequences evocative of manual input on a keypad.

Null messages on these schedules are rare. The traffic from before the null message is usually sent again from the next transmission onwards. For these reasons, messages on this network were believed to be fake traffic, containing no real content. The reasons for this fake traffic, maintaining so many schedules of it, and using only a subset of this operator's modes are not understood.

The affected schedules are as follows: