Russia’s New Mystery Shortwave Station | Hacker News Reader

Russia’s New Mystery Shortwave Station

hackaday.com

106 pointslxm16 comments

I was watching UVB leading up to the war, it was pretty mundane, up to where people in the Estonia / Latvia / Lithuania / Belarus corridor started jamming the channel with music or drawing pictures on the SDR heatmaps.

Eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWFg3i2dNK4

After that it devolved into a popularity contest over who had the strongest transmitter or was geographically closest to SDR recievers.

Then kiwisdr got ticked off and stopped letting people do time domain reflectometry to triangulate the signals.

My bets are on this new signal being a troll.

Can you explain a bit how somebody can stop others from trying to triangulate?

Kiwisdr maintains the software that is used on the web frontends of their SDRs, they just disabled the feature and (at the time) people couldn't use it anymore.

There are other ways to triangulate signals, but that means buying receivers and putting feet on the ground.

what does triangulate mean here? i'm guessing locate.

Yes. From two or more sites plot the intersection of strongest signal radiating pattern, and the centroid is the most likely location of the transmission assuming it's single sourced, and you can plot directionality of the RF. This is called triangulation because at sea you are recommended to get at least 3 points of reference which becomes a "cocked hat" (by visual analogy) to the location being plotted, distances and angles being computed by.. triangulation. The seaborne method is directly analogous to radio signal finding.

Thank you

Why would kiwisdr care?

It uses their server.

you mean TDoA not TDR.

Yes my mistake, I don't use it very often... I usually only listen. Nice feature though.

They didn't jam anything but the WebSDR receiver.

Must be a slow news day at Hackaday. This is doomsday speculation about something interesting, based on someone else's YouTube video about a signal marker.

The Russian Military transmits a constant signal to prevent anyone else from taking up residence on that frequency and it also allows receivers to ensure they are on the right frequency while waiting for a message broadcast at a specific time.

The start of a new station is itself somewhat interesting, and the only "doomsday speculation" is them saying some people think it's a doomsday machine but that isn't very likely.

I'm commenting here so it reaches relevant eyes but does anyone remember that Russia nameserver (I think) that disappeared and then reappeared somewhere else a couple of years later...that was somehow significant to the armchair intelligence community.

In the cold war they use to spin up these stations just to keep the other side busy trying to decipher it.

The station is also famous in HAM in China

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