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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

The US had HAARP[0] which was researching use of high frequency radio waves in the upper atmosphere which was also surrounded by conspiracy theories. One theory was that HAARP was responsible for the massive flooding in the early 90s of the Mississippi river due to the Jet Stream to severely change course due to the effects of HAARP. Another was that HAARP opened up a hole in the atmosphere which allowed a small portion of Alaska to receive a much more intense dosing of solar radiation.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_...

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For non-hams, "high frequncy" here refers to the "HF" band of roughly 3-30MHz.

Or, as anyone else might call it, low frequency.

Afaik, it didn't work at whatever it was trying to do, which IIIRC had something to do with submarines.

That was one of the stated purposes. They thought that they would be able to communicate with deeply submerged submarines with something more than 3 letter codes using ELF. They also thought they would be able to communicate further distances by reflecting the signals off of the ionosphere. They also thought they could disrupt warheads on re-entry. There was a lot of ideas about this place. I guess when you are getting the government to fund such a project it's going to need a lot of things it can pivot to when the original idea fails.

HAARP isn't the same type of installation as the Soviet example in the article. It is a radio transmitter, not used for radar.

Alaska had the "dew line" which was an installation similar to the Soviets for detection of ICBM's. It covered the perimeter of the horizon towards Russia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Early_Warning_Line

Clear AFB in Alaska has (maybe had) an operational radar station that looks very similar to the Russian one. Saw it in person a few times driving by as a kid. Not sure if it still exists or was upgraded with something smaller.

Sorry, wasn't trying to compare HAARP to Woodpecker by like for like purposes. I was mentioning more on totally odd radio installations cloaked in conspiracy.

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