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Is that Russian station still sending signals? I watched a YouTube thing about it. I think nobody cracked the code as to what it’s doing.
by flatiron 5y ago
Is that Russian station still sending signals? I watched a YouTube thing about it. I think nobody cracked the code as to what it’s doing.
- dogma1138 5y agoNumber stations and some either weird shit is still going on.
- mhh__ 5y agohttps://priyom.org/number-stations https://priyom.org/number-stations There are a few still transmitting, if you mean number stations. If you mean UVB-76 then I'm pretty sure it's just them parking the frequency for when the American imperialists set the sky ablaze. (You can apparently hear the operators listening to music or watching memes every now and again so it's obviously not a hugely important broadcast)
- jazzyjackson 5y agowow that website is a treasure trove of encoding details My only exposure to number stations is the podcast "99% Invisible", an entertaining account sprinkled with audio clips of various stations: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/numbers-stations/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/numbers-stations/
- animal_spirits 5y agoGot a link to the youtube video?
- flatiron 5y agoUVB-76 is the mysterious station. forgot the exact video.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoTwo theories I like wrt number stations. 1. Most of the time you don't have a message to send, so you send random numbers. Maybe you have an agreed upon header to signal to your spy that the following bytes are significant 2. Maybe you don't have any spies, and just want your adversary to think you have spies, so you blast your numbers station into their territory just to make them nervous. Who knows, someday maybe you'll have spies, and you wouldn't want to announce this change by suddenly having a numbers station.
- heavyset_go 5y agoRelated to #2, the US puts out bogus patents, press releases, etc so that adversaries will spend resources investigating whether they're real or not. Other countries do it, too. That's how the US got Project Stargate[1] in response to word that Soviets had psychic spies. Some number stations could be a low-cost effort to keep other nations busy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
- trasz 5y agoNote that the description above doesn't match the Wikipedia article: it wasn't "bogus patents", it was a full fledged research program.
- handrous 5y agoIt reads like it's the outcome of the Soviets doing this successfully. The US spent resources on a bunch of BS (a full-fledged research program) because the Soviets got the US to believe they were taking it seriously and had achieved results.
- heavyset_go 5y agoRight, the Soviets successfully caused the US to spend time and resources on a full fledged research program based on rumors about Soviet psychic spies.
- mijowi 5y agoThe US regularly does this as well. Coded messages in the form of seemingly random letters and numbers are broadcast over HF and VLF in the clear all over the world. One use is for Emergency Action Messages (nuke orders). [1] NIST also makes broadcasts for things like timekeeping. You can listen to 5k or 10k Hz and it’ll tell you what time it is. Handy for checking that your gear works. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Action_Message https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Action_Message
- sciurus 5y agoI think you meant megahertz, not kilohertz. The human-readable broadcasts are at 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20 MHz. https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-distribution/radio-station-wwv https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-di...
- mijowi 5y agoYes, MHz, my mistake