Thursday, September 09, 2010

Is UVB76 Gone Again?

All channels on the Internet repeater have only static for 4625 kHz. The PVO air defense transmissions at 3 kHz are still there, though much weaker. The Internet link works, though at greatly reduced volume. The Buzzer is simply not there.

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Yesterday was quite an interesting day. It is apparent that The Buzzer was using two different transmitters, and maybe two different call signs. It's hard to know for sure. UVB76 is at least a standard international call from Russia's alphabetical block. The other one heard yesterday, MDZhB, is Cyrillic. Cyrillic has appeared in Russian station IDs before, but as tactical calls. So the possibilities are:

Two transmitters, using different call signs.
Two transmitters, one sending a message using a tactical ID.
Two transmitters, both using message-specific tactical IDs.

One interesting possibility is that the second transmitter, which has truly world-spanning capability, was activated specifically for the three messages sent over it, then shut down again. All of this indicates a high degree of human intervention in what was assumed to be an automated transmission, which in turn would indicate that it's more than just an old Cold War system no one ever turned off.

This would tend to support the commonly offered theory that UVB76 is a military alerting station for some kind of command control comms. This would resemble a far less active version of the USA's Emergency Action Message (EAM) broadcasts, which are coded military orders with priority traffic status.

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