Russian Long-Range Aviation on 8112 kHz CW: the ground station's Morse marker

What you hear

For most of the hour, nothing but band noise. Then, close to the top of the hour, or twenty or forty minutes past it, a clean Morse tone starts: dit dah dah, dit dah dah, the letter W, sent over and over in a steady machine-like rhythm for about two minutes, then silence again. There is no callsign, no text, no reply. When no aircraft are up, the marker does not come at all, and the frequency can stay empty for days.

That is what makes it useful. Listeners who follow the net treat the W marker as a sortie sign: if it is there, the voice frequencies of the same set are worth watching for the next few hours; if it is absent, the evening will probably be quiet. The Morse is slow and regular enough to read by ear with no training, and on the waterfall it shows as a dotted line in the same three-element pattern.

Who transmits and why

The net belongs to Russia's Long-Range Aviation, the strategic bomber force, which keeps contact with its aircraft on long flights through HF voice and Morse nets. Morse survives here for the same reason as in other military nets: it gets through noise and fading when voice does not, and a marker like this needs no operator to notice it, just a tone where there was none. What the W itself means to the net is not known; the pattern, two minutes at :00, :20 and :40 while aircraft are flying, is the observation, and the sortie interpretation is the listeners', not an official explanation.

8112 kHz is the ground Morse frequency of the winter set, used from about November to February together with the voice frequencies 5827, 8131 and 11200 kHz, where the ground station answers as Balans; 11318 kHz is the second Morse frequency of the same set. For the autumn set an older source gives 8162 kHz, with less certainty.

Listening is not prohibited. The marker is sent in the open, in plain Morse, for anyone with a receiver; the program only receives, and in most countries receiving an open transmission is legal, while some restrict the retransmission or use of what is heard. Know the rules where you live; nothing here is a legal guarantee.

When and where to listen

The timing is the whole trick: be on the frequency a minute before :00, :20 or :40 UTC and listen for two minutes. 8112 kHz carries well from the Moscow region across Europe from mid-morning to late evening, and the marker, a single steady tone, gets through at signal levels where voice would be hopeless; receivers in Finland, the Baltic states and Poland hear it cleanly, and western Europe usually does too after dark. In the daytime, when 8 MHz is weaker over long paths, 11318 kHz is the one to try.

The catalogue sets CW with a narrow passband of a few hundred hertz, which is what a single Morse tone wants: the noise drops and the dits and dahs stand out.

In ShackDeck

Station catalogue → Military → Russian Long-Range Aviation 8112 CW (ground, winter). The program picks a public receiver that covers 8112 kHz, tunes it, sets CW and narrows the filter, so the marker comes out as a clean tone; no receiver, antenna or account of your own is needed. The program's CW decoder shows the letters in the text panel. The second winter Morse frequency, 11318 kHz, and the autumn one, 8162 kHz, have their own rows.