You may have noticed that a nuclear apocalypse did not follow thereafter well spotted! The station had been moved from the remote Russian village of Povarovo to another location, much more difficult to triangulate.
This gave a few brave investigators an opportunity to look around the station. One Russian explorer found a military logbook that appeared to confirm the station had been broadcasting messages from the Russian state, while others captured some fairly creepy images of a dilapidated and run-down military base, that looks like it could have been abandoned way back in the Cold War era.
As we descended into the basement of one of the buildings and ventured to a door that lead outside of the area of the building, when we opened it we were hit with a very vile chemical smell… it smelled very… acidic… I guess," the explorers wrote in a Reddit AMA. In the room that was underground the building itself there was not much of interest. A few desks and filing cabinets filled with more useless papers.
A few broken electronics and a bunch of other general crap. Though mostly abandoned, it may still be watched. During their tour of the station, they were interrupted by a woman they describe as being in her mids. This website uses cookies to improve user experience. By continuing to use our website you consent to all cookies in accordance with our cookie policy. Share on Facebook. In mid-August, the buzzing stopped again. It resumed, stopped again, started again. Then on August 25, at am, UVB went entirely haywire.
First there was silence, then a series of knocks and shuffles that made it sound like someone was in the room. Before this day, all the beeping, buzzing, codes, and numbers had hinted at an evil force hovering on the airwaves. Now it seemed as though the wizard were suddenly about to reveal himself. For the first week of September, transmission was interrupted frequently, usually with what sounded like recorded snippets of "Dance of the Little Swans" from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake.
On the evening of September 7, something more dramatic—one listener even called it "existential"—transpired. Just a few years before, such a remarkable development on a shortwave station would have been noted by only a tiny group of hobbyists. By opening up UVB to an online audience, Aaslaid had managed to take shortwave radio—one of the most niche hobbies imaginable—and rejuvenate it for the 21st century.
They can't help but ponder the significance of it, wondering about the purpose behind the pattern. No one knows for sure, which is both the worst and the best part of it. As you might expect, the Buzzer's history is murky. Roughly 30 years ago, it's said, the Soviets built a radio station near Povarovo the accent is on the second syllable , a minute drive northwest of Moscow.
At the time, Leonid Brezhnev was still alive, the Kremlin presided over an intercontinental empire, and Soviet troops were battling the mujahideen. After the Soviet Union collapsed in , it was revealed that Povarovo was controlled by the military, and that whatever happened there was top-secret. Shortwave radio aficionados developed various hypotheses about the role of the station in Russia's sprawling, military-communications network.
It was a forgotten node, one theory ran, set up to serve some function now lost deep in the bureaucracy. It was a top-secret signal, others believed, that transmitted messages to Russian spies in foreign countries. More ominously, countered another theory, UVB served as nothing less than the epicenter of the former Soviet Union's "Dead Hand" doomsday device, which had been programmed to launch a wave of nuclear missiles at the US in the event the Kremlin was flattened by a sneak attack.
The least sexy theory, which posited that the Buzzer was testing the thickness of the ionosphere, has never enjoyed much support. Before Aaslaid's Internet relay and the events of , the dedicated trackers of UVB probably numbered no more than a thousand.
Some had been listening in their spare time since the s, holed up in attics, garages, basements, and cluttered offices. Many spent their days working for large organizations—insurance companies, telecommunication conglomerates, militaries, universities.
Some hesitated to disclose their locations to fellow listeners; others used pseudonyms or handles. Before the fall of Communism, many of them actually believed they were in danger, assuming that they could be tracked through technological methods that were never quite clear by the same shadowy forces—KGB agents or radio engineers at the CIA or MI6 or Mossad—that controlled the stations they obsessed over.
The listeners often thought they might have unearthed something top-secret, that there were files at foreign spy agencies with their names on them. They loved that they didn't know what they were listening to and were fascinated by the unending strangeness of this persistent, mindless, clandestine, evil beeping. He first tuned in to UVB in January He says he didn't mean to.
He was looking for another station, rolling across the dial, and suddenly he heard the crackly, wispy beep beep beep. And stopped.
This is how many fans talk about their discovery of the station: It was late, and they were looking for something else—a weather channel, a maritime report, some Air Force chatter—when all of a sudden UVB broke through the ether and they were captivated, unable to stop listening to the haunting pulse that bleated through the cold and snowy dark all the way to their receivers.
The question they all wanted answered was, what the hell is this? Before the Internet, shortwave fans knew of one another's existence largely through niche publications, whether photocopied newsletters like Monitoring Times or small-circulation magazines like Popular Communications. Cover line on the October issue: "Eavesdropping on Aircraft Communications! They would clock the frequency of the beeping and listen for discrepancies or numbers or voices just beneath the veil of sound.
They would ferret out other subscribers to the newsletters they received and other members of the shortwave radio associations they belonged to and share their findings. Even today, listening to UVB is like listening to a world that hasn't existed for decades. This feels especially true late at night when you're in a dark basement, headset on, enveloped by all the pops and whirs and snippets of anonymous voices from other signals seeping across the airwaves—"these little trips into fantasy," as RoomA puts it, that "happen when you are sitting in front of your receiver passing by Radio Havana at 3 in the morning.
Most observers believe that UVB is an idiosyncratic example of what's called a numbers station, used to communicate encrypted messages to spies or other agents. Typically, these stations transmit numbers in groups of five, making it impossible to detect partitions between words and sentences.
The numbers can be decoded using a key in the possession of the intended listener. You don't even need to encode it or hide it. Everybody ignores it -- it's just discounted as a credible source. Man, those Russians were brilliant at the spy game. Is the basis for this story really the Wikipedia page which cites as its primary source a Geocities web site? Respectfully disagree.
This comment [slashdot. A wikipedia page, and a link to an old slashdot article. My, it's good to have standards in what goes on the front page. You know, if you timed it right, you could have a Wikipedia article that used a Slashdot story as a reference, and the Slashdot story could point back to the Wikipedia article. Despite much speculation, the actual purpose of this station remains unknown to the public, but it is probably used for relaying military orders.
Later in the article there is a section speculating about military use but that's all using an old geocities page in Russian found in web archive. Would be good if there was something a little more authorative on the subject. It's being broadcast from a military base. It's purpose is known,. To communicate information to military personnel.
It's purpose is known. There is one big problem with this theory - lack of said information. They wouldn't be enough to even arrange delivery of food to one base, on any given day. As far as I know, most of information in armies, starting from 60s and up to this day, is transmitted over telephone or teletype or computers. The transmission channels are usually buried cable copper or fiber, radio relay at a few GHz, and the satellite.
Many of these channels use encryption. HF is basically not used much because of the required antenna size, power, and limited channel capacity.
HF has larger range tens of thousands of km but that is not always an advantage, especially among the military. If the microwave link uses high gain antennas which is not unusual then most of the energy is in the beam, and not much is in side lobes.
If you set up the link with two dishes and use just enough power to reliably communicate, radiation to the side will be far below the noise, especially if the satellite doesn't have a high gain antenna. Use CDMA to further make life difficult for the eavesdropper. This is untrue. The HF propagation depends on many factors, such as time of the day and state of the ionosphere and the location of both ends of the link.
Only the ground wave is stable, but it is limited to a couple hundred km radius. Since the messages are rare and not repeated for 24 hours, we can presume that the transmission is intended for receivers that are hearing the signal all the time.
They can't be far away. This, IMO, is true. This explains the buzz - it is a convenient, simple signal that can be used to detect which way around the planet the signal is coming from and also to see if you receive it from both directions. The messages are of no consequence; they can be just a test of the microphone or of the entire system. Since there is no confirmation of reception of messages which on HF is essential I think the transmitter and the receiver had a parallel telephone link, and the receiving end reported over the telephone when the message was received.
Perhaps the message itself was random. Some messages were clearly sent by a technical personnel from the transmitter room, not by a trained speaker in a studio. Most of the speculation about the messages themselves is also ridiculous. For example [googlesightseeing. The names used in the message are used in some Russian spelling alphabets, and spell out the first word - "naimina", which one commenter at the UVB blog translated as "on names". This "translation" is wrong, the word "naimina" is random and has no meaning.
This message can be anything. It was repeated twice within a minute. Any HF operator here can tell that you need to be pretty sure about the quality of your link to do that - the message was repeated only to allow the receiving end to check the message, not to tune to the signal or to fiddle with the filter or to rotate the antenna Some say the buzz is a "dead man's switch.
First of all, there are no backups, and any transmitter has to do down occasionally, at least for maintenance - kW final stage is not a joke, you don't change vacuum tubes that are under live 25 kV. There could be a backup transmitter in the same building, of course, but even then there probably ar. I wasn't sure what a "beacon station" was, so I looked around. I couldn't find the term "beacon station" but did come across "electric beacon" and "radio beacon".
So your guess is that the constant buzz is used for navigation? Maybe like a backup for GPS or other ways of navigating? It's not a digital signal, so it's not as if there are 1s and 0s in the buzz. While it would be trivial to hide a message inside a digital signal where the data is precise and any slight differentiation can be interpreted as a signal - in analog transmissions that's simply not the case.
You cannot hide digital information in an analog transmission, unless it's a patently obvious signal such as spikes doing morse-code or something similar unless it's an analog signal with a lot of noise such as an active music station or television signal, which can be used to disguise a possible "obvious" signal.
However this is not the case with the buzz. It's been analysed constantly for years, and has always been a consistant sound, without fluctuations or changes. Until recently when it changed pitch and length. So, if it was transmitting "hidden" information in the buzz, then that information thus far can be decoded as several years of 1s followed by a few months of 0s.
The process you're referring to is steganography, and using a constant buzzing would be the WORST way to hide a signal, but it's taking me too long to try and explain why.. Hopefully someone else can fill this in a little better. You came up to me in Starbucks at 47th St. This particular submission may be crap, but the situation around UVB demonstrates that it is becoming hard to keep any secrets on the shortwave band.
There are thousands of listeners at any given time. And what is much more important, they now have the ability to record big chunks of spectrum and analyze it in a way that was only available to government agencies not long ago.
The next big step is exchange of such information. It may be outright illegal UK or borderline legal US to tell other what you've heard, but people do this more and more on various forums. IT's been monitored by Hams forever.
My grandfather listen to certain number stations in the 70s. You can keep secrets on ham bands and all shortwave bands. Heck, hide in plain sight. Broadcast your "secret" on a SLow Scan old WEather sattelite channel and imbed your information in the image of the earth from the last pass.
Chances are that it will be ignored as nobody would say "Hey And sure, you could go through all those hopes.. The codes read out on UVB are a bunch of unrelated words and numbers, which reminds me of the codes we'd use back when I played rugby, and similar to how baseball codes work. Most of the content of our calls were nonsense, thrown in to confuse it. We'd designate ahead of time, for example, that the third and fifth words were the meaningful ones, or simply mix in non-code words with the codes, although there was always some syntax order mattered.
Similarly we'd memorize calls our opponents used in lineouts and scrums, and try to parse them out at halftime. A halftime code crack almost always meant winning the game by a good margin. So my guess is that not all of the UVB code is meaningful, but there's an underlying template which is probably switched between transmissions. Still crackable, but can it be cracked before the game is over? Is you think some is out to get you using invisible helicopter, then you are paranoid.
Even if there are actual people out to get you. A military broadcast from a military base was for military personnel? I'm shocked I tell you, shocked. I read someplace, back when this station first stopped transmitting, how it had been tracked down within Russia to be a scientific installation.
It's broadcast were used to measure some some sort of distortion or atmospheric change on radio waves, possibly coinciding with something to do with the sun. I just spent about 15mins looking for the articles I read about this and I. It's where about are known, and it's on a military installation. Meaning that if the US nuke the Soviets, the buzz would stop broadcasting and there Nuclear Launch would automatically happen.
While it is a fact that Russia had these, it is unknown if this was one. This seems rather odd, broadcasting military orders in the clear. OK, they are using a code. So we don't know what they are saying. But military units usually have encrypted transceivers. If I were designing a military radio system, I would not include a clear broadcast mode to eliminate the possibility of some critical information going out that could be easily intercepted. I'm guessing that these broadcasts are targeted at people who can not reasonably be expected to carry secure radio gear with them.
Like spys. In some countries, possessing crypto equipment can get you arrested. In many, it will attract undue attention. So they use shortwave. Everyone can get their hands on a shortwave receiver. And there's always the plausible deniability of tuning to BBC when you're not receiving orders. The continuity of the broadcasts can easily be explained as a method to thwart traffic analysis.
Most of the stuff they broadcast is garbage, just to keep the traffic going. If one broadcasts only when orders are to be sent, then the enemy can deduce that something is afoot when traffic picks up. Its possible that UVB may not have issued an order for years, but is being kept alive 'just in case'.
If they only powered up the transmitter when they needed it, that would be a dead giveaway that sleeper agents were being activated. Yes, except they know what change to look for that means 'you've been activated' that pretty much everyone else will ignore or not notice. Just because it appears to be the same message broadcasting over and over again doesn't mean it is, it just means you haven't noticed a change. That doesn't mean the intended recipient didn't notice the signal, just that you didn't.
Don't forget, the signal is also streamed [mixstream. For those spies who cannot reasonably be expected to carry unsecure radio gear. As someone who has written his fair share of military orders over the years, and then subsequently transmitted them over a radio, this is highly unlikely to be a military orders station - and for one basic reason:.
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