Mysterious Radio Station UVB-76 Goes Offline

leathered writes "Tinfoil hatters around the world are abuzz that UVB-76, the Russian shortwave radio station that has been broadcasting its monotonous tone almost uninterrupted since 1982, has suddenly gone offline. Of course no one knows what the significance of this is, but best brush up on your drills just in case."

Comments

It's back up

[jimmydevice]

I dialed into 4625 KHz and I can hear the buzz, Guess it was just a maintenance down-period.

Re:It's no mystery

[dgatwood]

Chances are, it's a power failure. The area reportedly had a significant storm yesterday. It's possible that the power failed and that they didn't have enough fuel or battery capacity or whatever to keep it running during an extended outage. That would also neatly explain why it reportedly came back and has reportedly died again.

Re:No satellite imagery?

[omni123]

http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&q=56.082778,37.089444(UVB-76)&ie=UTF8&ll=56.081568,37.089972&spn=0.014464,0.045404&z=15

it's missing on Google Maps right now... that's actually pretty interesting. I'm not really the conspiracy type but definitely interesting.

Bing has aerial photography that isn't really helpful..
http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?v=2&cp=56.082778~37.089444&style=h&lvl=15&sp=Point.56.082778_37.089444_UVB-76___

More sources at http://toolserver.org/~geohack/geohack.php?pagename=UVB-76&params=56_4_58_N_37_5_22_E_type:landmark_region:RU

Re:Article Quality.

[Vahokif]

You never know, the Russian Woodpecker signal turned out to be a nuclear launch detection radar in Chernobyl.

Re:Actually it usually does

[hairyfeet]

Don't forget the biggest one, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was used to escalate our involvement in Vietnam and led to 50k Americans dead, and of course now turned out to be total bullshit.

As for TFA it is probably just another form of numbers station, which aren't exactly big secrets. Hell I used to listen to them with my grandfather on his big Korean War military radio (I need to find some tubes for that old thing and break it out) and according to him it was pretty common knowledge those were for spy communication. It was one of those things that nobody with high enough clearance would confirm, but he would laugh and say it was one of those "We don't know WHAT that is, wink wink" kind of deals.