New York Times: In the late 1970s amateur radio operators began hearing raucous bursts of electronic chatter flooding the airwaves and interfering with normal operations. Cutting across the high-frequency bands, the staccato signals resembled a rapidly chopping helicopter blade or the steady fire of a machine gun. Some thought the sound was more like a woodpecker, and that was the name that stuck.
The Russian Woodpecker, as the transmitter came to be called, was pinpointed by triangulation to an area in the Soviet...