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UVB-76 Explained
Useful Wheat writes "Recently slashdot covered the reappearance of UVB-76. The function of the mysterious transmitter has been revealed: UVB-76 is used to transfer orders to military personnel, along with the time at which they should be executed. 'Words for the radio messages and code tables are selected mainly from the scientific terms of chemistry (Brohman), Geology (ganomatit), philology (Izafat), geography (Bong), Zoology (kariama), history (Scythian), cooking (drying), sports (krolist) and others, as well as rare Russian words (glashatel).' The page continues to list all 23 transmissions that have been made from the station in the past, showing that UVB-76 may be more active than believed."
Uhh.. wikipedia only states that it's speculation; like everything else about UVB-76, this is unconfirmed.. so in reality it still isn't explained. What a crappy submission.
for borscht just got a whole lot sexier.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Is the basis for this story really the Wikipedia page which cites as its primary source a Geocities web site?
Forgive me for being skeptical.
Actually the Wikipedia page clearly cites a geocities page as the "creditable source"... Not sure if that makes it better or worse.
A wikipedia page, and a link to an old slashdot article. My, it's good to have standards in what goes on the front page.
You: Gorgeous redhead, red dress, big brown eyes, smile like an angel.
Me: Nerdy-looking guy in torn dungarees and blue T-shirt
You came up to me in Starbucks at 47th St. and Eighth Ave. and said in a golden voice, "Excuse me, but haven't we met in California last year?"
I said, "Uh, yeah. maybe."
You turned around and disappeared on Eighth Ave.
Please, please call me on UVB-76.
It cites a way-back-machine archive of a Russian language geocities page that's no longer available. I've seen more credible citations carved into bathroom stalls.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Close. They're running SkyNyet. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This particular submission may be crap, but the situation around UVB-76 demonstrates that it is becoming hard to keep any secrets on the shortwave band. There are thousands of listeners at any given time. And what is much more important, they now have the ability to record big chunks of spectrum and analyze it in a way that was only available to government agencies not long ago. $500 receiver (there are even sub-$100 DIY alternatives) and free software is all you need. /.
The next big step is exchange of such information. It may be outright illegal (UK) or borderline legal (US) to tell other what you've heard, but people do this more and more on various forums. Now including
No, it's brilliant fieldcraft!!!
By putting your information in the clear on geocities, nobody believes it. You don't even need to encode it or hide it. Everybody ignores it -- it's just discounted as a credible source.
Man, those Russians were brilliant at the spy game. :-P (Actually, from everything I understand, they actually were.)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Sometimes I think stupid shit is posted just for us to poop on.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I believe that this numbers station is actually a countdown timer for the army of robots created by the soviets in the 80s. When the buzzing sounds end and another codephrase is sent the army will rise up from their vaults that were placed strategically around the world by traveling vacuum salesmen and spread the glorious message of communism, with lasers.
I for one welcome our new robot overlords...
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
The codes read out on UVB-76 are a bunch of unrelated words and numbers, which reminds me of the codes we'd use back when I played rugby, and similar to how baseball codes work. Most of the content of our calls were nonsense, thrown in to confuse it. We'd designate ahead of time, for example, that the third and fifth words were the meaningful ones, or simply mix in non-code words with the codes, although there was always some syntax (order mattered). Similarly we'd memorize calls our opponents used in lineouts and scrums, and try to parse them out at halftime. A halftime code crack almost always meant winning the game by a good margin.
So my guess is that not all of the UVB-76 code is meaningful, but there's an underlying template which is probably switched between transmissions. Still crackable, but can it be cracked before the game is over?
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
It's being broadcast from a military base. It's purpose is known. To communicate information to military personnel.
There is one big problem with this theory - lack of said information. 30 messages over several decades are laughably insufficient. They wouldn't be enough to even arrange delivery of food to one base, on any given day.
As far as I know, most of information in armies, starting from 60s and up to this day, is transmitted over telephone or teletype or computers. The transmission channels are usually buried cable (copper or fiber,) radio relay (at a few GHz,) and the satellite. Many of these channels use encryption. HF is basically not used much because of the required antenna size, power, and limited channel capacity.
HF has larger range (tens of thousands of km) but that is not always an advantage, especially among the military. That's why most of the radio links are V/UHF and microwave; they are harder to intercept, you need a satellite flying overhead. If the microwave link uses high gain antennas (which is not unusual) then most of the energy is in the beam, and not much is in side lobes. If you set up the link with two dishes and use just enough power to reliably communicate, radiation to the side will be far below the noise, especially if the satellite doesn't have a high gain antenna. Use CDMA to further make life difficult for the eavesdropper.
So where the HF may be of use?
Theory 1: The HF may be chosen because it is received all over the world.
This is untrue. The HF propagation depends on many factors, such as time of the day and state of the ionosphere and the location of both ends of the link. Only the ground wave is stable, but it is limited to a couple hundred km radius. Since the messages are rare and not repeated for 24 hours, we can presume that the transmission is intended for receivers that are hearing the signal all the time. They can't be far away.
Theory 2: The HF may be chosen because this is a beacon to monitor propagation conditions.
This, IMO, is true. This explains the buzz - it is a convenient, simple signal that can be used to detect which way (around the planet) the signal is coming from (and also to see if you receive it from both directions.) The messages are of no consequence; they can be just a test of the microphone or of the entire system. Since there is no confirmation of reception of messages (which on HF is essential) I think the transmitter and the receiver had a parallel telephone link, and the receiving end reported over the telephone when the message was received. Perhaps the message itself was random. Some messages were clearly sent by a technical personnel from the transmitter room, not by a trained speaker in a studio.
Most of the speculation about the messages themselves is also ridiculous. For example:
The names used in the message are used in some Russian spelling alphabets, and spell out the first word - "naimina", which one commenter at the UVB-76 blog translated as "on names".
This "translation" is wrong, the word "naimina" is random and has no meaning. This message can be anything. It was repeated twice within a minute. Any HF operator here can tell that you need to be pretty sure about the quality of your link to do that - the message was repeated only to allow the receiving end to check the message, not to tune to the signal or to fiddle with the filter or to rotate the antenna... (well, a beam antenna for 4 MHz would be large, but not impossible.)
Some say the buzz is a "dead man's switch." It could be, but not likely. First of all, there are no backups, and any transmitter has to do down occasionally, at least for maintenance - 100 kW final stage is not a joke, you don't change vacuum tubes that are under live 25 kV. There could be a backup transmitter in the same building, of course, but even then there probably ar