Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Is the Buzzer Back?

I don't think so. At precisely 9:11 AM (hmmmm) Pacific Daylight Time (1611 UTC), the buzzing sound started up again. But it is much louder on the USB stream than the AM one, and since The Buzzer was in upper-sideband, full-carrier mode (H3E), this should not have been the case. Russian test counts and ominous 50-Hz noises are also being broadcast on 4625 at present.

Yesterday had several interesting non-pirate transmissions on this frequency. "F6J6" is a Russian duplex military net with a callup or roll call daily around 1800-2000. The voice message may or may not have been the same agency doing the ones on The Buzzer.

Then there's the intermittent Morse code at 3 kHz, indicating that the station is off-frequency. This has to be the Russian Air Defense (PVO). What you're hearing is an automated system which sends character strings in Morse code, at regular intervals. These have a strict format, in which the first character is a break (BT) and a time stamp appears. This time is local to the Moscow area. The rest of the data is presumably target locations. Missing characters are substituted with a question mark (?). These stations have been on for years.