9 ms·
UVB-76
- justusthane 6y agoA couple months ago I got really interested in SDR (software-defined radio) for a brief period. I made a write-up on my site about my experiences (includes The Buzzer, number stations, and some other neat things): https://www.justus.ws/tech/sdr-adventures-in-shortwave/ https://www.justus.ws/tech/sdr-adventures-in-shortwave/
- aftbit 6y agoUVB-76/The Buzzer (4625Khz) LIVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LegzZZRIqj4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LegzZZRIqj4
- bayindirh 6y agoListening to The Buzzer and other number stations (especially The Conet Project recordings) for a long time send chills down my spine.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- alibarber 6y agoThe story of Amateur Radio operators organising in order to clear their frequencies of the Soviet 'Woodpecker' (OTH RADAR System) always makes me smile: https://www.qsl.net/n1irz/woodpeck.html https://www.qsl.net/n1irz/woodpeck.html
- aftbit 6y agoMore about the Duga radars. At least some of the antennas were located in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga_radar
- anamexis 6y agoI appreciate that someone took the time to closed caption the audio recording of the woodpecker. But it's in Polish, so I can't understand it.
- Metacelsus 6y agoI'm learning Polish, where's the transcript?
- johnghanks 6y agoWhat's with HN allowing just links to Wikipedia with no substantive associated discussion from the OP?
- codezero 6y agoThe “buzzer log book” that urban explorers claimed to have found in the previous location is neat, but probably an intentional distraction or hoax. http://www.numbers-stations.com/media/sample-uvb76-logbook.pdf http://www.numbers-stations.com/media/sample-uvb76-logbook.p...
- mhh__ 6y agoI'm curious if the spooks even bother with numbers station on radio any more, I commented on some reddit spam the other day that the string of words in the comment was so low-entropy it could literally have been used as a numbers station. It's almost more suspicious to be listening to a radio at all these days, so unless you needed coverage of areas without internet access it would make sense to just dump the numbers onto a .onion or similar.
- gspr 6y agoHard to beat the resilience of analog radio in the event of a disaster, though. Reddit, not so much.
- bayindirh 6y agoSome of the number stations also start to embed digital sub-bands to their normal voice transmissions. So, the communication can carry more data and carry it between autonomous systems now. Also, while number stations broadcast over the air, the signal might not terminate at a radio receiver. It might be picked up by another system and forwarded in a different form. A similar model is used by Chinese FireDrake jammer. There are numerous broadcast stations for FireDrake and all are fed by the same satellite radio channel (one of the audio channels of the minority radio stations) which play extremely high intensity chinese classical music which loops perfectly and lasts 60:00 minutes sharp. When they spot a transmission they don't like, they tune the ground station to it and blast with the music. Intensity of the music drowns out the other transmission. Interesting stuff. Also, low tech stuff is extremely resilient to outside effects. Modern IP telephony will collapse if something bad occurs. POTS, won't sneeze at it probably.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- eznzt 6y ago>I commented on some reddit spam the other day that the string of words in the comment was so low-entropy it could literally have been used as a numbers station You should've seen Terry Davis...
- xxpor 6y agoFor the more "I don't believe most conspiracy theories but that's some coincidence" among us, I do find it extremely interesting there was a big uptick in voice chatter in October 2016.
- sbelskie 6y agoWould that really be a “conspiracy”?
- crispyporkbites 6y agoYes literally everything in Russia is related to trump. It’s well known that everyone in Russia and the rest of the world is obsessed with American elections and trump. It’s all anyone ever talks or thinks about. This station was started on 1973 when trump was a young man in America. Coincidence? I think not
- mhh__ 6y agoThere is enough evidence of it now that denying the Trump-Russia thing is the conspiracy theory. Stone and Flynn have been pardoned (for what...), Mueller indicted something like 100 people russian or otherwise.
- dilyevsky 6y agoThe so called “russian dossier “ ended up being complete fabrication. Im sure putin would very much like to be as powerful as certain american news sources make him out to be (due to optics). “Fsb rigged the election” is just birther movement of the left
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoThere's far more hard evidence for Russian interference in Brexit and the US far-right - actually the far-right across the West - than there ever was for the birther nonsense. For example, there's an almost endless wave of this kind of thing: https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-russia-disinformation-idUSKBN26M5OP https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-russia-disinfor...
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoIf you’re interested in this topic, be sure to read (and listen to) The Conet Project. I have all the original CDs, although they are available as mp3s free online. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conet_Project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conet_Project
- LeoPanthera 6y agoIt's also on Spotify, perhaps surprisingly.
- ljf 6y agoCheers for the tip - that is some awesome background noise but occasionally fills me with dread and fear... Still listening though, amazing bit of history.
- fld 6y agoAnother recommendation is the The BBC Radio 4 Broadcast of "Tracking The Lincolnshire Poacher", which also includes a short interview with the creator of The Conet Project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvr6o7fBcTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvr6o7fBcTY
- digitalice 6y agoI believe it is just a channel marker. There is further information on this site: https://priyom.org/military-stations/russia/the-buzzer https://priyom.org/military-stations/russia/the-buzzer They also tracked the signal using TDoA: https://priyom.org/blog/real-buzzer-site-found https://priyom.org/blog/real-buzzer-site-found!
- dang 6y agoIf curious see also two threads from 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1407383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1407383
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jcims 6y agoIf you want to listen yourself, websdr, kiwisdr, sdrconsole and sdrsharp all provide some mechanism to listen to HF frequencies over the internet.
- Dobby2020 6y agoThis is actually a Russian military coordination center. Every buzz contains encoded code fragments that evil Russian hackers use to create a coherent action in order to undermine institutions of democracy. Even if the Internet is down it will keep working as a sign of the supremacy of the analog technologies. My grandpa is one of the architects.
- jcun4128 6y agowow that dead hand idea is wild... wonder if that's spoofable/jammed to what extent would they trust it before it actually launched missiles.
- danirod 6y agoA cool alternative for getting into SDR without purchasing a real device is WebSDR, a webapp to tune and listen to SDR devices that some people have connected online, such as this one (beware, autoplays) [1]. Tune in to 4625 kHZ, and there it usually is, UVB-76, buzzing on all of its glory. [1]: http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/
- mopsi 6y agoIn Russian-speaking world, the function of UVB-76 is known and scans of expired codebooks have been posted online. Long story short: it's a military communications system that uses one-time pads. Military units monitor transmissions and use unique decoding sheets to translate random numbers and keywords into messages such as "readiness level 1" or "execute action 5". It's mainly a backup system intended for use when everything else fails, because even off-the-shelf hand-cranked consumer radios would enough to receive messages, given the right decoding sheets. The amount of radio traffic on the station has usually seen an uptick during major military exercises.
- laretluval 6y agoIt could be a numbers station but (1) the known numerical messages are very short and (2) that wouldn’t explain why there is a buzzer.
- conscion 6y agoMy guess would be that the buzzer is so that the listeners know the station is still "up" and hasn't been destroyed
- merlinscholz 6y agoOr to keep the frequency free from other transmitters, as described in the article
- bayindirh 6y agoThe buzzer is there for both to mark the frequency and signal that it's alive. Its old sequence had a hourly faster buzz which returned to normal at the beginning of the hour. It looked like this X:59:00 - Buzzing gets faster. (X+1):00:00 - Normal buzzing resumes. I think it served as a crude hourly sync signal for some systems until GLONASS came and provided atomic level sync. This also implies that there may be other non-human systems listening for this station. It can be speculated that Russian Perimeter (Dead Hand) system [0] may be one of the listeners. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
- protoman3000 6y agoEvery time I read about numbers stations and their cryptic message history I get reminded back to this intense creepy, spooky and shocked feeling I experienced at the end of the pilot episode of a very famous older show.
- sitzkrieg 6y agoits ham radio, not HAM or an acronym darnit
- gfaure 6y agoThe occurrence of images of Pokémon and Spongebob do sound out of character for the station -- is it plausible that someone with a very strong transmitter is toying with the operators?
- rootw0rm 6y agoit literally says so right on the page. i'm fairly certain the operators don't care what the spectrogram looks like. as far as how powerful the transmitter was, obviously the rogue transmission would be stronger for those closest to it.
- mpalfrey 6y agoGood ol' UVB-76. The Buzzer has been around for an age. I got _very_ into number stations a few years ago. Still have a vague interest in them these days but there's not so much traffic now. Scared the crap out of myself when I first found them though! There's all sorts of interesting/creepy stuff out there on the airwaves.
- adwi 6y ago> A strange event occurred from 20:29 UTC to 21:33 UTC on the same day, slightly above the end of the buzzer's frequency, where there were transmissions that contained spectrogram imagery of animals, Pokémon characters, and SpongeBob characters, as well as some Latin and Cyrillic characters and phrases on the radio's waterfall. Other spectrogram imagery was also broadcast during the night and before the station stopped transmitting, indicated "73 de N." on the waterfall.