The Squeaky Wheel: the third Russian marker, a squeak on 5367 kHz

What you hear

The sound that gave the station its name is a brief, scraping squeak, like a wheel that nobody has oiled, repeated over and over with a short gap between. It does not drift, it does not pause for station breaks, and it has been doing this around the clock since the middle of the 2000s. On a waterfall it looks like a tidy row of short dashes, and once you have heard the Buzzer's rasp and the Pip's tick you can tell the three apart in seconds. That is probably not an accident: each marker needs to be recognisable by ear to the people meant to hear it.

Very occasionally the squeak stops and a man's voice reads a message: a callsign, a word, groups of numbers, with repeats. Listeners call these messages of the Monolith format, after a word that recurs in them. They are rarer here than on the Buzzer or the Pip; months can go by without one, which is why a recording of a Squeaky Wheel message gets passed around among listeners the way a rare bird sighting does among birders.

Who transmits and why

The transmitter is in southern Russia, in the Rostov area, close to the Pip. That alone says most of what can be said with confidence: this is the third channel marker of the same family, holding a frequency for a military net, probably the same Southern Military District net the Pip serves. The purpose of a marker is simple and unglamorous. It keeps the channel occupied, shows that the equipment is working, and gives anyone listening an instant check that the frequency is clear of interference. The content of the voice messages has never been explained, and the people who could explain it do not. Anything you read about what the numbers mean is a guess.

Listening is as simple as it sounds: the signal is sent in the clear for anyone with a receiver, and the program only receives it.

When and where to listen

The Squeaky Wheel uses 5367 kHz by day and moves to 3363.5 kHz after dark at the transmitter, the usual arrangement for keeping an HF channel usable through the night. The night frequency has its own entry in this guide. During the European day the 5367 kHz signal is heard well on receivers in eastern and south-eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Turkey, and reasonably from central Europe; from Britain and Scandinavia it is weak by day and better in the evening on the lower frequency.

Upper sideband, as the program sets it, gives a crisp squeak with the carrier below the audio. The signal is AM-compatible, so AM works too, and some listeners prefer it when the receiver is strong. A narrow filter cuts out the utility traffic that lives around 5 MHz.

In ShackDeck

Station catalogue → Mystery stations → The Squeaky Wheel. The program finds a public receiver that covers 5367 kHz, tunes it and sets USB; you need no receiver, antenna or account of your own. In the evening, open The Squeaky Wheel (night) for the same marker on 3363.5 kHz.