priyom.org

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:

Mode Week Day UTC Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
M14 Every Saturday 08:00 4730
09:00 4650
ID 523
Mode Week Day UTC Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
M14 Every Sunday 23:00 4890
24:00 4760
ID 617
Mode Week Day UTC Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
E06 1st, 3rd Thursday 20:30 4836 5186 5948 5186 4836
ID 321 891 724 891 321
following Friday 21:30 4760 5197 5731 5197 4760
ID 472 634 315 634 472
Mode Week Day UTC Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
M14 2nd, 4th Tuesday 18:20 4636 5947 6856 5947 4636
ID 186 346 163 346 186
following Wednesday 19:20 4761 5463 5938 5463 4761
ID 748 537 417 537 748
Mode Week Day UTC Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
G06 2nd, 4th Thursday 18:30 4519 5934 6887 5934 4519
ID 271 579 842 579 271
following Friday 19:30 4792 5442 5943 5442 4792
ID 436 947 218 947 436