The radio structure of S5 1803+784

The BL Lacertae object S5 1803+784 has been monitored with very long baseline interferometry at lambda = 3.6 cm in 43 epochs between 1986.21 and 1993.95. The motivation of this work is to obtain statistically meaningful data with which to study the short-term structural variability in the source on monthly time-scales. We present a detailed analysis of the structural evolution seen in the milliarcsecond-scale jet by way of model-fitting results. Within the simplest identification scenario, the jet can be described as a bent chain of seven jet components within 0.2- and 3-mas separation from the core. New components seem to emerge almost regularly (every 2 yr) from the core. Three jet components approach the brightest and so-called 'stationary' component (at similar to 1.4 mas at 8.4 GHz) with apparent superluminal motion of 8-11 c. In this paper, we show that the 'stationary' component (under the assumption that this is the brightest jet component in each epoch) oscillates, and we discuss several possible explanations. We show that a reconfinement shock can easily reproduce the observed most recent oscillation of the 'stationary' component. We present evidence that the average jet ridge line is significantly curved and discuss the possibility that the jet components follow a helically bent path.