RSBN (Radiosistema Blizhney Navigatsii) is the Soviet TACAN analogue. It has approximately the same features:
● VOR-like operation (fly a radial to or from the beacon, intercept radial)
● Automatic flying of arcs at a specified distance ("Orbita" mode)
● Automatic flight in the vicinity of a beacon (SRP mode), to a specified point on a track parallel to a certain radial
● Notification when reaching a point on a radial at a specified distance
● ILS functionality ("Katet" mode) if the beacon has additional equipment (eg PRMG) coupled to it at the airfield
● "Meeting" mode where two airplanes could find each other in "peer-to-peer" radio comm
● "Ident" mode whereby pressing a button in the cockpit would "blip" the airplane on the radar screen (a small ATC station could be driven from the RSBN station on-site).
RSBN beacons are also mobile (often mounted on trucks) and easy to deploy in the field. To this day the Russian military use RSBN for different operations, and some military RSBN stations are enabled from time to time to provide for seasonal operations on the most important airfields. A beacon is tuned using the "channel" just as TACAN. Channels have two digits - 0 to 4 and 0 to 9, this makes 44 channels available at any given time. RSBN station handling ILS-like operations could service less airplanes at the same time, so Soviet airfields would often operate a spare RSBN unit to provide glideslope and localizer.