A 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/
In 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.
Backup communication systems like this are often implemented with the most basic of components to increase reliability and ease of use in stressful situations.
The trade off is sometimes human error happens. It isn't really a big deal since the messages themselves are encrypted inside of a secure facility then transmitted to a non-secure area that handles the actual broadcast (since it would be stupid to put a massive transmitter in the room with your super secrets).
The 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.
The Wikipedia article makes the operation of that station appear to be at a level that is far more relaxed than what I would expect from a really important continuous liveness signal. So I consider the use for something as lethal as the Dead Hand system unlikely, if it even still exists.
According to available information (and speculation), perimeter listens to various inputs (which is a good thing).
It's said that it has connections to seismic and pressure sensors and can check whether communication to critical infrastructure is intact. So it keeps tabs on many heart-beat signals it seems. UVB-76 might be one of them.
Moving a low traffic radio station with an interesting sound just because a bunch of HAM radio guys doesn't make sense. It has to have some higher function to warrant the move.
With the new over the horizon radar systems Russia is deploying, I guess that signals from these would be evaluated too.
Going in to wild speculation territory, Russia's in-house CPUs would fit the bill for these kind of systems nicely.
A 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.
The 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
If 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.
Another 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:
Cheers for the tip - that is some awesome background noise but occasionally fills me with dread and fear... Still listening though, amazing bit of history.
I'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.
Some 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.
>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
Good 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.
> 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.
The 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?
Every 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.
For 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.
Yes 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
That was around the time russian consulates etc were being booted off and other political turmoil due to changes in the white house residents. Don’t need conspiracy theory to explain this
