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A ghostly radio station that no one claims to run
- ajmarsh 9y agoNeet, I used to listen to machine sent morse code number stations as a kid on my shortwave. https://lifehacker.com/5961035/how-to-listen-to-real-spy-broadcasts-right-now https://lifehacker.com/5961035/how-to-listen-to-real-spy-bro...
- f4rker 9y agodid the bbc just learn what number stations are? super cute. i think the bbc has a very young writing staff these days.
- criddell 9y agoI read this article last weekend and after reading it, I put batteries in my shortwave radio to see what was out there. Turns out, there's pretty much nothing. I couldn't hear anything on 4625 kHz. I let my receiver scan and when it was done I checked out what it detected and found absolutely nothing interesting. The most powerful signals were Christian broadcasts that had a kind of doomsday feeling about them. It seems like there's a lot of underutilized spectrum.
- tuxxy 9y agoWere you in a good spot? I can hear a lot of stuff with my shortwave receiver and I'm in SLC, Utah. Occasionally, I get to hear pirate transmissions and whatnot.
- criddell 9y agoI'm in central Texas (Austin). No idea if that's a good spot or not. I pick up a lot on the FM and AM bands. The shortwave bands feel comparatively empty.
- PappaPatat 9y ago"pirate transmissions" I am surprised. Only a month ago I met a guy who (as an "art project") has actually started to transmit on the shortwave. Bought an old army radio and was now jumping all over the country with the installation and transmitting... well, arty stuff. He claimed he got responses every now and then, now I think he might be right. Is that a thing? I bailed out of the radio waves 30 years ago when I got access to data links...
- wedowhatwedo 9y agoAs the article says, just because you couldn't hear it the one time you tried, doesn't mean it isn't transmitting. You hearing it depends on the condition of the ionosphere. The time of day, the number of sunspots along with other things will effect your reception of the signal.
- squarefoot 9y agoNight hours are best for shortwave reception. You could also need an external antenna depending on how far you are listening from. Another problem, probably the biggest one today, which affects reception on these frequencies (and generally on the HF bands) is the radio noise generated by many bad designed switching power supplies and appliances. Switching regulators (power supplies, converters, chargers etc.) for efficiency and size reasons have moved from the tens of KHz through the hundreds of KHz and recently they started working above 1 MHz which means having into our homes one or more transmitters with antennas (mains or output cable) that if not properly designed, filtered and shielded will render reception on HF bands next to impossible.
- criddell 9y agoThanks for the information. The shortwave frequencies still feel very underutilized. When I scan the FM (88 - 108 MHz) and AM (540-1600 kHz) radio frequencies, I pick up a lot of stuff. The shortwave band is relatively vast and feels very sparse. Considering how valuable spectrum is these days, it's hard to believe that we couldn't find a better use for it. Is it because it is so prone to noise that it's less valuable?
- eeZah7Ux 9y agoBandwidth is key. Transmitting digital signals at high rate would eat up most of the spectrum.
- hourislate 9y agoFrom what I understand it isn't on all the time. There are actually long periods of time where it doesn't transmit anything. Last week when I was digging a little deeper I ran into an older discussion on another board where they were saying it was off for years and came back on when Russia invaded Ukraine. It could be off again, don't know.
- crispyambulance 9y ago> The most powerful signals were Christian broadcasts that had a kind of doomsday feeling about them. Perhaps WMLK? Weird stuff coming from Berks County PA! Here's the antenna: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4793923,-76.279183,3a,44y,282.49h,101.16t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sH4_xv__VjD34GAZpLV5ycg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4793923,-76.279183,3a,44y,28...
- criddell 9y agoThat sounds familiar. I think I was also getting something from somewhere near Scottsdale, AZ.
- jacquesm 9y agoIt might be single sideband, try USB or LSB.
- simmons 9y agoAs others have mentioned, the time of day may have effected reception of the 4625 kHz station. However, in general, I've noticed that there seems to be far fewer stations received on the shortwave band these days, compared to the 1980's when I listened to shortwave a lot as a kid. I think this is because I'm using a low-end receiver with its built-in telescopic antenna instead of a more sophisticated SWL setup with a proper antenna. Broadcasters such as the BBC World Service target specific geographies with their transmissions so they can be received on a low-end radio, and they no longer bother targeting developed regions such as North America with these transmissions. I'm guessing if I used the same radio somewhere like Africa, I'd be able to pick up a lot more stations.
- Neliquat 9y agoMore noise to signal also.
- soneil 9y ago> It seems like there's a lot of underutilized spectrum. There's some good reasons for this. HF is pretty challenging to fully utilize. You have propagation that varies between "worldwide" (so it's difficult to assign new bands without ITU involvement), and "sunspot" (so you better have a plan B). And these variations aren't just over the duration of a sunspot cycle, but also over the day/night cycle. eg, for maritime use, we have channel clusters at 2, 4, 6, 8, 12 and 16MHz. Which to use depends on the time of day the distance to the other station, and how much the sunspot cycle is messing with your first choice. Fun! Then the physical challenges that arise from the ideal antenna length being proportional to the length of the wave. At 2.4GHz the challenge is precisely cutting your quarter-wave antenna to a fraction of a mm (31.25mm). At 2.4MHz same challenge becomes finding space for a 31.25m (~100feet) antenna. Another big consideration is that these frequencies aren't particularly friendly to high-speed digital use. I suspect this is related to Nyquist theorem - the fewer waves you're receiving per second, the fewer symbols per second can be encoded into them. And finally, some rather difficult legacy users. Aviation and Marine users who consider their usage life-or-death, radio amateurs that likely do too (heh), radio-navigation (I was reading about Loran making a comeback recently, to provide some backup when GPS is manipulated), over-the-horizon radar (which can be a lot like sharing a telephone call with a foghorn), etc. All this taking up about as much bandwidth as one wifi channel ..
- wichert 9y agoFor the lazy who were hoping to find an audio clip in the article: you can find some here: http://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/The_Buzzer_(ZhUOZ_MDZhB_UZB76) http://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/The_Buzzer_(ZhUOZ_MDZhB_UZB76)
- rosbrith 9y agoA few years back some brave souls visited the site of the old transmitter at Povarovo and posted some pictures and video of the trip: http://bydunai.livejournal.com/749.html http://bydunai.livejournal.com/749.html
- jimmytucson 9y agoThey link to a Wired article about the station from 2011: https://www.wired.com/2011/09/ff_uvb76/all/1 https://www.wired.com/2011/09/ff_uvb76/all/1
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y agoOld soviet infrastructure like this always reminds me of the STALKER games.
- bahjoite 9y agoor the one linked in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcv_cGLjxCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcv_cGLjxCY
- besselheim 9y agoThe WebSDR at http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901 http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901 (based in the Netherlands) can be used to hear the station as it is broadcast. Set to 4625 kHz, USB.
- dabber 9y agoThis site is really cool. Thanks for sharing though I'm afraid I'll be wasting quite some time today playing around with it :) [edit] It looks like the site doesn't get such a large number of people very often and the CPU load is getting too high to hear anything clearly. For clearer audio of the buzzer check here: http://websdr.printf.cc:8901/ http://websdr.printf.cc:8901/
- 11thEarlOfMar 9y agoAny speculation that it's as mundane as a test tone for a specific radio device? Is your radio working, is it calibrated properly...
- Luc 9y agoNo, not really.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bamboozled 9y agoIf you read the article it kind of gives it's most probably reason for it's existence away.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- westbywest 9y agoAs mentioned in the below comment, the author buried the probable lede: most of the time transmission is a placeholder to discourage others from using the band. During exceptional circumstances (as defined by the station's operator), it will transmit coded messages to global/regional operatives. E.g., to coordinate espionage when conventional communications are offline.
- jpalomaki 9y agoThat constant sound is also useful for the spies. Without that it would be hard to know you have tuned on the right frequency (I'd assume they would use some pretty simple and low tech radios).
- wbl 9y agoThey would use commercially avaliable radios in the place they live to deter suspicion.
- gregmac 9y agoThis reminds me of a numbers station. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station
- 1_2__4 9y agoIt is a numbers station. It's been known for years as the article says, and referred to as a (one of the many) numbers stations. Many/most don't actually read numbers.
- khedoros1 9y agoIt reminds me of a number station because the article had a long section talking about numbers stations, and speculating on where "the Buzzer" fits in, given the assumed typical uses for those stations.
- PascLeRasc 9y agoThis is very very cool. Feels like something out of Half Life.
- linuxguy2 9y agoWho pays the power bill?
- jankotek 9y ago> the Buzzer operates at a relatively low frequency known as “shortwave”. This means that – compared to local radio, mobile phone and television signals – fewer waves pass through a single point every second. It also means they can travel a lot further. Nice explanation.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoIs it? If you imagine a fixed point in space, a short wave would mean more waves pass through it every second, not less. Short waves have more energy (they have bounce up and down more quickly) which allows them to travel further.
- jankotek 9y agoNo, it is not. The worst shortwave explanation I ever read. From BBC!
- DiabloD3 9y agoThe irony is the BBC operates the best (and maybe only major commercial) shortwave stations in the world, as part of their AM radio service.
- PoachedSausage 9y agoMost of the actual radio transmitters are no longer operated directly by the BBC. As far as I know the only site still under their operation is BBC World Service Atlantic Relay Station on Ascension Island. Whilst the BBC still produces the radio and TV programme content, in the UK the radio and TV transmitters are operated by Arqiva and World Service shortwave by Babcock. I was lucky enough to work on one of the last remaining operational high power longwave AM radio transmitters in the UK at Droitwich Transmitting Station. BBC Radio 4 longwave is broadcast at 500kW on 198kHz (locked to a HP 5065 Rubidium standard) and can be received in large parts of western europe.
- calebm 9y ago
- ipunchghosts 9y agootp22
- andyjohnson0 9y agoIf you're interested in Number Stations the you should check out the Conet Project [1]. [1] https://www.irdial.com/conet.htm https://www.irdial.com/conet.htm
- anfractuosity 9y agoIt sounds from the article they likely do know where the antennas are based? If not, is it possible to use direction finding to obtain the location of antennas propagating shortwave frequencies? (I assume this is more difficult due to the use of the ionosphere) Also is there any remote chance the hardware attached to the aerial (power amps etc) could pick up unwanted RF or other interesting electrical interference and re-broadcast it, which may give some useful information.
- askvictor 9y agoWhat's to stop an adversary from broadcasting the same tone on the same frequency and overpowering the signal in certain areas? It strikes me that if the conjecture (of it being a reserved frequency for war time command signals) is correct, it would be relatively easy to break. Perhaps the weekly random words are some kind of authentication mechanism, but that seems like a long time to have to wait to authenticate the signal.