UVB-76 Broadcasts New Voice Message 560
Doug52392 writes "Following days of increased activity, the Russian numbers station UVB-76 has sent out a new voice transmission. The transmission, sent out on August 23, 2010 at 9:35AM PST, recited the following in Russian: 'UVB-76, UVB-76 — 93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74 — 9 3 8 8 2 nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4' The station, believed to be a part of the former Soviet Union's dead man's switch system, has been continually broadcasting for over twenty years, and its purpose has never been fully explained."
Re:Location (Score:5, Informative)
Location: The station's transmitter is located at Povarovo, Russia (56458N 37522E / 56.08278N 37.08944E / 56.08278; 37.08944), which is about halfway between Zelenograd and Solnechnogorsk and 40 kilometres (25 mi) northwest of Moscow, near the village of Lozhki.
Re:Location (Score:3, Informative)
The station's transmitter is located just outside Povarovo, Russia at (..., ...), which is about halfway between Zelenograd and Solnechnogorsk and 40 kilometres (25 mi) northwest of Moscow, near the village of Lozhki. The location and callsign were unknown until the first voice broadcast of 1997.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76 [wikipedia.org]
Previous Story (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Location (Score:4, Informative)
If it's 40 miles from Moscow its inside the Moscow Military District so it's undoubtably secure and monitored.
So instead of weather, bears and wolves theres just going to be the Moscow detachments of Alpha Group, Vympel or more likely OMON.
Google map it (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Location (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Location (Score:4, Informative)
Related to Russian spies?1!?!?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!? (Score:4, Informative)
One of the ideas of what the hell this thing is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76 [wikipedia.org]:
"UVB-76 is widely believed to be used to transmit encoded messages to spies, as is generally assumed for the many numbers stations that populate shortwave frequencies. Transmitter sites for some numbers stations have been triangulated to military and/or intelligence installations in several countries,[citation needed] although no nation's government will confirm or deny the existence of the stations or their purpose."
Could this be related to the recent case of the 10 (with one on the run, right?) kinda-sorta-russian-spies news fest? It could be the Russians talking to other operatives they have lurking about.
Or maybe It's just some Russian dudes spending government money to boost their shares in tin & aluminum foil.
There's a lot of "numbers stations" (Score:3, Informative)
There's a lot of numbers stations around the world. The Conet project offers a selection of recordings from many of them (available on the Internet Archive [archive.org]). Unless you have some specific reason to believe that you tuned into this particular one, I would guess that you just picked up one at random.
Re:Location (Score:3, Informative)
It's the thing recieving it that's interesting.
Exactly. It also might explain why the transmitter isn't secreted away in some little corner of Siberia but rather smack next to Moscow.
If the Kremlin goes poof nuclear-style, so does the transmitter.
Re:Location (Score:5, Informative)
Re:hrm... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm rather surprised that the general public is both unaware and unconcerned that the entire Russian atomic arsenal is armed, pointed at us and the trigger autonomous... it will trigger based on a set of circumstances unknown to us that were set up 50 years ago.
I presume you're talking about "Perimeter" [wikipedia.org]. While it is supposedly capable of operating in autonomous mode, it's not the normal mode of operation. It's only supposed to be turned on when the danger of a sudden nuclear strike is very likely, so as to ensure a retaliatory strike even in the face of the most fast and overwhelming incoming attack. Assuming it still exists, it has most likely never been on since the dissolution of the USSR.
Worth noting that all of this is mostly conjecture. Aside from the fact that something along these lines exists, there's very little reliable data on what the system even is in practice. Of course, that's what makes it ripe for conspiracy theories.
Re:Location (Score:3, Informative)
I heard that Sarah Palin can pick this up quite easily from her home in Wasilla!
Oh my god, she's a Communist double-agent kill-bot! This explains everything. I always suspected that "Nikolai" was actually just "Trig" in Russian.
Re:Location (Score:5, Informative)
Just want to point out (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, the message:
"UVB-76, UVB-76 — 93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74 — 9 3 8 8 2 nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4'"
'naimina' is equivalent to Nikolai Anna Ivan Michael Ivan Nikolai Anna
Also, notice that the '74 14 35 74' is the same as '7 4 1 4 3 5 7 4'. The second half is just to make sure the other person got the message OK, I suppose. That means the total message is just the first part, which is only:
"93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74"
That's way too short to encode very much more than anything informational. I'll bet it just says "Hey guys, happy birthday" or something.
Sure they can. (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody can explain Fox News either.
Sure they can.
- The cultural/political/ideological orientation of much of the population of the United States falls into one of two major groupings. (They tend to be called things like "liberal" and "conservative", "left" and "right", or other pairs of names. But they're each coalitions of many subgroups bound by rough agreement on a few major points.)
- The broadcast news media became sufficiently (and visibly) biased in its programming that the members of one of the groupings felt that they were not being served by it. This created a market opportunity. (This was similar to the one that spawned CNN, when mainstream news migrated from news reportage to infotainment-product generation.)
- Fox News marketed itself as providing "fair and balanced" coverage - half from the viewpoint of each of the two groupings. This made them the only show in town for the one that felt underserved. Thus they grabbed the eyballs of about half the population's newswatchers to sell to their advertisers.
- This worked until about the 2008 campaign, when it became clear that Fox News was serving only one (Neocon) of the four-or-so major and several minor factions within the underserved group. This left several large (and moneyed) factions feeling underserved again and created another marketing opportunity.
- Fox News is going after the biggest coalition of the remaining factions (libertarians + paleoconservatives + {"Tea Party" minus neocons}) with new shows on their "Fox Financial Network" feed.
TV news is easy to understand once you get that it has two purposes:
1) Making money by selling eyeball time to advertisers.
2) Exercising political power by inserting itself between the people in office and the rest of the world and creating a false image of the constituents' opinions and world events for the office-holders.
Re:Google map it (Score:3, Informative)
At 21:58 GMT on Christmas Eve 1997, 15 years after it was first observed, the buzzing abruptly stopped; to be replaced by a short series of beeps, followed by a male voice speaking Russian who repeated the following message several times: “Ya — UVB-76. 18008. BROMAL: Boris, Roman, Olga, Mikhail, Anna, Larisa. 742, 799, 14.
Seems like this isn't the first time there has been a similar broadcast. The names appear to be just a way of confirming the spelling of a message, like someone saying "that's A as in Apple". In this case, the message is 93 882 N as in Nikolai, A as in Anna, etc. Still interesting to think about what the purpose might be, though.
Re:Location (Score:5, Informative)
ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!
(morbo is very, very displeased by this lameness filter)
Re:Location (Score:3, Informative)
Finland too.
And many other rights regarding the wide open nature, known as "Everymans rights". It includes things such that you can go and collect berries, mushrooms etc. camping, hiking etc. afaik too
Re:Just want to point out (Score:5, Informative)
On ships and so on, they use names and stuff like that to encode words, so that when they speak them out over the radio there's less chance of being misheard. I don't know what that system is called but perhaps somebody else does. Sorry if I explained that badly.
While there are several versions throughout the history of radio, the most common phonetic/spelling alphabet these days is the NATO phonetic alphabet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICAO_spelling_alphabet [wikipedia.org]
We still use it in the military for standardized communications. For more specialized applications, you might hear the letter 'A' as 'acer' or 'T' as 'talon' to let the listener know that you are using a specific identifier (bay A, truck T, etc.) instead of spelling a word.
The transmission seems to follow the standard russian spelling template. Make of that what you will; I just thought I'd get you started.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_spelling_alphabet [wikipedia.org]
-b
Re:It is well known where it is (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Location (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe pay-for subscribers have newer imagery of the site and can repost. The clear picture is odd: can't distinguish ANY antenna shadows from all the building shadows. The long straight lines on the grass are just ground partitions of some sort and are unlikely to be parallel to the antenna's clock-like moving shadow exactly as the imaging satellite passed by. If you're in doubt, notice even gravestone cross's shadows are easily picked up from satellites [google.com]
That gravestone is probably a massive solid hunk of stone, and has a solid continuous shadow.
An antenna, on the other hand, is typically constructed as a truss or mesh of rather thin metal pieces, perhaps supported by guy-wires -- it's mostly air, and the shadow, accordingly, will be composed of very thin lines widely separated by areas of no shadow. That may well not be noticeable from a satellite.
old /. story about numbers stations. (Score:3, Informative)
following my nose around wikipedia I found a link to this /. article from 11 years ago.
http://slashdot.org/it/99/09/16/0055245.shtml [slashdot.org]
Re:unexplained?? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Google map it (Score:3, Informative)
It's probably just the russian version of the NATO phonetic alphabet [wikipedia.org]
If he'd said "november alpha india mike india november alpha" instead of "nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICAO_spelling_alphabet [wikipedia.org]
Fun fact, "Easy company" from WW2/"Band of Brothers" would have been called "Echo company" in today's army.
Re:This is someone's job. (Score:3, Informative)
Which is exactly why real numbers stations broadcast continuously and not only when sending useful messages. Otherwise you can correlate activity with broadcasts, which can be a huge information leak.
Re:Google map it (Score:3, Informative)
See this as an example. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Just a guess, It's a salt. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Google map it (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Lat/Long (Score:1, Informative)
The very same way you can interpret it the other way around.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=74.14N+35.74E&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=39.456673,86.572266&ie=UTF8&ll=74.496413,75.058594&spn=29.524281,173.144531&z=3
74.14N 35.74E the barents sea, where a russian training is taking place
http://www.barentsobserver.com/russian-anti-aircraft-missile-training-in-barents-sea.4811241-116320.html
Re:It is well known where it is (Score:1, Informative)
Numbers stations aren't just a Russian thing. There's one located in Florida as well, and they're not known for welcoming guests.
In fact, the local cops are scared of the place.
Re:Location (Score:3, Informative)
It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.