UVB-76 (The Buzzer) transmitted a new voice message | Hacker News Reader

UVB-76 (The Buzzer) transmitted a new voice message

uvb-76.blogspot.com

56 pointssimanyay10 comments

Wikipedia article on The Buzzer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76

Whilst the meaning/intention of the voice messages may be "mysterious", the general purpose of the signal is not - it's for ionosphere research:

http://elpub.wdcb.ru/journals/rjes/v10/2007ES000227/2.shtml

Scroll down to "Doppler Radio Sounding of the Ionosphere", note the broadcast frequency.

My guess is that the occasional voices are either a) someone else randomly broadcasting on the same frequency, b) some technical hitch at the broadcast station. Whatever the reason, 99.9999% it's going to be totally mundane.

I guess it's fun to try to crack codes, but it seems pretty pretty likely that it would be some sort of uncrackable one-time pad.

The idea that the numbers are simple lat/lon coordinates (referring to a point in the Barents Sea) seems plausible ... although why the Russians would be transmitting something that openly and obviously is a little weird. Doubtless they have more secure communication channels for their Navy.

It's a bit surprising to me that nobody has been recording and archiving the station's transmissions until recently (besides, presumably, other nations' intelligence services); it's relatively simple compared to a lot of other projects, and obviously 'numbers stations' are something that fascinate a lot of geeks and radio enthusiasts.

People have recorded numbers stations in the past: http://www.archive.org/details/ird059. These CDs, a collection of number station recordings, were released in 1997. Not sure if anyone has been recording since then. Listening to some of the samples is fascinating.

I was exposed to these before the Wilco album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" (which uses number station samples). It was fun to have my mind blown by the album and then explain to my friend (who introduced me to the album) about number stations.

Wonder if it's related to this: http://i.imgur.com/bktYf.png

Yeah, when I think "conspiracy", I rush over to 4chan to see what the internet's finest minds have come up with.

On an entirely unrelated note, a suspected british spy was killed this week.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2010/08/20108258200...

Probably unrelated, but on Tuesday: Two CF-18s shadowed a pair of Russian military aircraft Tuesday as they flew within 56 kilometres of Canadian soil

From: http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/08/25/cf-18s-russians-...

probably unrelated, but on Tuesday I saw a music video on TV. What do the two have in common? Well, they're both fairly regular occurrances that are usually not note-worthy.

Unless of course, you are an ardent devotee of Dimitri Soudas' propaganda.

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