The Goose: a honking Russian marker near Smolensk, silent since 2024

What you hear

For some years, anyone tuning to 4310 kHz in daylight, or 3243 kHz at night, met a sound that was hard to describe as anything but a goose: a short, nasal honk, repeated in a steady rhythm, hour after hour. It is the most comical of the Russian channel markers, and listeners named it accordingly. In the pattern of the Buzzer, the Pip and the Squeaky Wheel, the honking was the quiet state of the channel, and the interesting part came when it stopped.

The Goose stood out among its relatives for how much happened on it. Voice messages were read live, in the same callsign, number groups and code word format as on the other markers, but the operators were audible in a way the Buzzer's rarely are. There were moments when people at the transmitting end talked over the channel in plain Russian, checking the link or sorting out a mistake, and listeners recorded them. That made the Goose the best place to hear the human side of a system that otherwise only honks and buzzes.

Since August 2024 the marker has not been heard. The frequencies stay in the catalogue because stations of this kind have gone quiet before and come back, sometimes on the same frequency, sometimes with a new sound.

Who transmits and why

The transmitter was near Smolensk, in the west of Russia, which puts it in the same part of the country as the Alarm and the Air Horn and separates it from the Rostov markers in the south. It appeared in the 2010s. The marker's job was the usual one: keep the frequency occupied, show the net that the channel is alive, and give anyone listening a quick check of the path. The net it belonged to is assumed, like the others, to be military, and the voice traffic looked like military traffic. Nobody has said so officially, and nobody has explained why the station went silent. A change of equipment, a move to another frequency, or simply the end of the net's need for this channel are all possible, and none is confirmed.

Nothing here is secret in the practical sense: the signal went out in the clear, and listening was and is only receiving.

When and where to listen

The honest advice is: check, do not expect. Try 4310 kHz during the day and 3243 kHz in the evening and at night; these are the frequencies the Goose used, and if it returns, these are the first places to look. Smolensk is close to the Baltic states and Belarus, so receivers in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland and Sweden were the ones that heard the marker best; from Germany and the Netherlands the night frequency was the reliable one. The lower frequency behaves like the 80 metre amateur band, wide open after dark and short by day.

The program sets USB, which suits an AM-compatible marker; if the station reappears and the sound seems wrong, AM is the alternative. Recognise the Goose by its sound rather than by any callsign in the messages.

In ShackDeck

Station catalogue → Mystery stations → The Goose. The program picks a public receiver that covers 4310 kHz, tunes it and sets USB, so you can check the frequency from anywhere without a receiver, antenna or account of your own. If the waterfall shows nothing on the stripe where the honk used to be, that is the current state of things, not a fault.