Calling all Euros (with radio)

Erich

L1: Registered
Mar 28, 2010
44
29
If you're reading this, thank you for giving the time to view this thread. I am part of the community that has given the time to monitor the semi-notorious UVB-76/MZhDB. Despite it not being a number station, and rather a russian military district transmission, we still do monitor it. And the transmission site has changed; in reality it's multiple sites now. And to figure out where these are, we have to triangulate the source of it. To do that, we need many, many different sources across Europe. So, I need to ask of you who have radios, or know someone who has a radio, to consider helping out. If there are 100 of you, and only 1 or 2 people do it, it'd be worth it.

For you who can't, you still can check up on the triangulation project here.
 

Dr. ROCKZO

L8: Fancy Shmancy Member
Jul 25, 2009
580
159
More like a secret as fuck Russian Government broadcast.

What is it?

It is an irritating, electronic noise, not unlike the sound of a truck horn played through a cheese grater. It is broadcast over a certain frequency, constantly, and has been since at least 1982. But the weird part isn't the tone, but what happens when it stops.


Hammertime?

In its 20-something year run, the sound has been interrupted only three times, the earliest known time being Christmas Eve in 1997. Each time a voice comes on and lists several Russian names and numbers before returning to the foghorn. The most recent occurrence was 2006, a mere three years before the time of this writing. It is clearly becoming more active after remaining quiet during the Cold War.

The case gets curiouser when you realize that the noise is apparently something held up to a live microphone rather than a recording or just some random feedback (distant conversations can be sometimes heard behind the sound, though they're difficult to decipher).


It sounds like "robble-robble."

That is, someone is actively broadcasting and maintaining the signal.

So What's the Deal?

Information on the mysterious station had been compiled here on Geocities, the best place for code cracking and speculation on the Web. From this, we know it originates from Russia, specifically here:


Military base? Home of Russia's shittiest FM radio station?

That listener, who helpfully kept his crucial analysis at the mercy of Geocities and Yahoo!, claimed the operator is the "1st Communications Hub of the General Staff of Army," and its purpose was to "transmit orders to the military units and recruitment centers of the Moscow military district."

Wikipedia argues that this makes no sense, since it's mostly just that simple buzztone. But honestly, who are you going to trust: A Web admin who didn't have the foresight to pay for a domain name, or the Illuminati-run Wikimedia foundation?

Our theory? It's not a buzztone at all. It's a message sent in the native language of a certain group of embedded Russian agents. Their native language being robot.

That's from Cracked, and Wikipedia presents the rest of the facts in neutral, cited glory.
 

Psy

The Imp Queen
aa
Apr 9, 2008
1,706
1,491
I remember this creeping me out. Thanks for reminding me. :(
 

Wilson

Boomer by Sleep
aa
May 4, 2010
1,385
1,223
Heh, they had episode of Fringe based on this and that is where i first heard about this, petty cool if you ask me, but like swordfish says, if Russians don't want us to know about it, we don't want to know about it, so why dig around something we don't want/need to know?

Still, cool stuff.
 

Erich

L1: Registered
Mar 28, 2010
44
29
Wikipedia is a horrible source, as the person in charge of the page refuses to let findings by the community to count as a legitimate source. But yes, it's part of a string of secret radio stations the russian military uses. They aren't encrypted, though; the 5-10 radio operators we've heard have most probably used a codebook. No book, no idea.

A guide to building the antenna is available through a link here.

You'll need any radio with shortwave capability for that antenna. UVB-76/MDZhB's frequency is 4.625MHz.

Some other links related to UVB-76 would be the following soundclouds of Webweasel, PresentedIn4D, and Danix111. They all also do a podcast series found here. Interesting stuff if you have a few hours to kill.
 
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