Inside The Russian Short Wave Radio Enigma
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/09/ff_uvb76/all/1
Somewhere in Russia a signal of mysterious beeps and buzzes has broadcast since
the
high-water days of the Cold War. But why?
Photo: Sergey Kozmin
>From a lonely rusted tower in a forest north of Moscow, a mysterious shortwave
>radio station
transmitted day and night. For at least the decade leading up to 1992, it
broadcast almost
nothing but beeps; after that, it switched to buzzes, generally between 21 and
34 per minute,
each lasting roughly a second-a nasally foghorn blaring through a crackly
ether. The signal
was said to emanate from the grounds of a voyenni gorodok (mini military city)
near the
village of Povarovo, and very rarely, perhaps once every few weeks, the
monotony was
broken by a male voice reciting brief sequences of numbers and words, often
strings of
Russian names: "Anna, Nikolai, Ivan, Tatyana, Roman." But the balance of the
airtime was
filled by a steady, almost maddening, series of inexplicable tones.
They don´t know just what they´re listening to. But they´re fascinated by the
unending
strangeness of the mindless, evil beeping.
The amplitude and pitch of the buzzing sometimes shifted, and the intervals
between tones
would fluctuate. Every hour, on the hour, the station would buzz twice,
quickly. None of the
upheavals that had enveloped Russia in the last decade of the cold war and the
first two
decades of the post-cold-war era-Mikhail Gorbachev, perestroika, the end of the
Afghan
war, the Soviet implosion, the end of price controls, Boris Yeltsin, the
bombing of parliament,
the first Chechen war, the oligarchs, the financial crisis, the second Chechen
war, the rise of
Putinism-had ever kept UVB-76, as the station´s call sign ran, from its
inscrutable purpose.
During that time, its broadcast came to transfix a small cadre of shortwave
radio enthusiasts,
who tuned in and documented nearly every signal it transmitted. Although the
Buzzer (as they
nicknamed it) had always been an unknown quantity, it was also a reassuring
constant,
droning on with a dark, metronome-like regularity.
But on June 5, 2010, the buzzing ceased. No announcements, no explanations.
Only silence.
The following day, the broadcast resumed as if nothing had happened. For the
rest of June
and July, UVB-76 behaved more or less as it always had. There were some
short-lived
perturbations-including bits of what sounded like Morse code-but nothing
dramatic. In mid-
August, the buzzing stopped again. It resumed, stopped again, started again.
Then on August 25, at 10:13 am, UVB-76 went entirely haywire. First there was
silence, then
a series of knocks and shuffles that made it sound like someone was in the
room. Before this
day, all the beeping, buzzing, codes, and numbers had hinted at an evil force
hovering on the
airwaves. Now it seemed as though the wizard were suddenly about to reveal
himself. For
the first week of September, transmission was interrupted frequently, usually
with what
sounded like recorded snippets of "Dance of the Little Swans" from
Tchaikovsky´s Swan
Lake.
On the evening of September 7, something more dramatic-one listener even called
it
"existential"-transpired. At 8:48 pm Moscow time, a male voice issued a new
call sign,
"Mikhail Dmitri Zhenya Boris," indicating that the station was now to be called
MDZhB. This
was followed by one of UVB-76´s (or MDZhB´s) typically nebulous messages: "04
979 D-R-E-
N-D-O-U-T" followed by a longer series of numbers, then "T-R-E-N-E-R-S-K-I-Y"
and yet
more numbers.
Just a few years before, such a remarkable development on a shortwave station
would have
been noted by only a tiny group of hobbyists. But starting the previous
June-after the first,
mysterious outage-a feed of UVB-76 had been made available online (UVB-76.net),
cobbled together by an Estonian tech entrepreneur named Andrus Aaslaid, who has
been
enthralled by shortwave radio since the first grade. "Shortwave was an early
form of the
Internet," says Aaslaid, who goes by the nickname Laid. "You dial in, and you
never know
what you´re going to listen to." During one 24-hour period at the height of the
Buzzer´s freak-
out in August 2010, more than 41,000 people listened to Aaslaid´s feed; within
months, tens
of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, were visiting from the US,
Russia, Britain, the
Czech Republic, Brazil, Japan, Croatia, and elsewhere. By opening up UVB-76 to
an online
audience, Aaslaid had managed to take shortwave radio-one of the most niche
hobbies
imaginable-and rejuvenate it for the 21st century.
Today, the Buzzer´s fan base includes Kremlinologists, anarchists, hackers,
installation
artists, people who believe in extraterrestrials, a former Lithuanian minister
of
communications, and someone in Virginia who goes by the moniker Room641A, a
reference
to the alleged nerve center of a National Security Agency intercept facility at
an AT&T office
in San Francisco. ("I am interested in `listening,´" Room641A tells me by
email. "All forms of
it.") All of them are mesmerized by this bewildering signal-now mostly buzzing,
once again.
They can´t help but ponder the significance of it, wondering about the purpose
behind the
pattern. No one knows for sure, which is both the worst and the best part of it.
As you might expect, the Buzzer´s history is murky. Roughly 30 years ago, it´s
said, the
Soviets built a radio station near Povarovo (the accent is on the second
syllable), a 40-minute
drive northwest of Moscow. At the time, Leonid Brezhnev was still alive, the
Kremlin presided
over an intercontinental empire, and Soviet troops were battling the
mujahideen. After the
Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it was revealed that Povarovo was controlled by
the military,
and that whatever happened there was top-secret.
Photo: Alver Linnama"gi
Estonian tech entrepreneur Andrus Aaslaid runs an Internet relay for UVB-76 out
of his attic
office.
Photo: Alver Linnama"gi
Shortwave radio aficionados developed various hypotheses about the role of the
station in
Russia´s sprawling, military-communications network. It was a forgotten node,
one theory
ran, set up to serve some function now lost deep in the bureaucracy. It was a
top-secret
signal, others believed, that transmitted messages to Russian spies in foreign
countries.
More ominously, countered another theory, UVB-76 served as nothing less than
the epicenter
of the former Soviet Union´s "Dead Hand" doomsday device, which had been
programmed to
launch a wave of nuclear missiles at the US in the event the Kremlin was
flattened by a
sneak attack. (The least sexy theory, which posited that the Buzzer was testing
the thickness
of the ionosphere, has never enjoyed much support.)
Before Aaslaid´s Internet relay and the events of 2010, the dedicated trackers
of UVB-76
probably numbered no more than a thousand. Some had been listening in their
spare time
since the 1980s, holed up in attics, garages, basements, and cluttered offices.
Many spent
their days working for large organizations-insurance companies,
telecommunication
conglomerates, militaries, universities. They lived in West Germany, Britain,
the Netherlands,
the US. Some hesitated to disclose their locations to fellow listeners; others
used
pseudonyms or handles. Before the fall of Communism, many of them actually
believed they
were in danger, assuming that they could be tracked (through technological
methods that
were never quite clear) by the same shadowy forces-KGB agents or radio
engineers at the
CIA or MI6 or Mossad-that controlled the stations they obsessed over. The
listeners often
thought they might have unearthed something top-secret, that there were files
at foreign spy
agencies with their names on them. They loved that they didn´t know what they
were listening
to and were fascinated by the unending strangeness of this persistent,
mindless, clandestine,
evil beeping.
"It was thrilling," says Ary Boender, 57, a financial consultant who lives near
Rotterdam,
Netherlands. He first tuned in to UVB-76 in January 1983. He says he didn´t
mean to. He was
looking for another station, rolling across the dial, and suddenly he heard the
crackly, wispy
beep beep beep. And stopped. This is how many fans talk about their discovery
of the
station: It was late, and they were looking for something else-a weather
channel, a maritime
report, some Air Force chatter-when all of a sudden UVB-76 broke through the
ether and
they were captivated, unable to stop listening to the haunting pulse that
bleated through the
cold and snowy dark all the way to their receivers. The question they all
wanted answered
was, what the hell is this? "The fun is and was to find out who they are and
where they
transmit from and what the purpose is," Boender says.
Before the Internet, shortwave fans knew of one another´s existence largely
through niche
publications, whether photocopied newsletters like Monitoring Times or
small-circulation
magazines like Popular Communications. (Cover line on the October 1985 issue:
"Eavesdropping on Aircraft Communications!") If something exciting happened on
UVB-
76-when there was an uptick in the duration of the beeps from, say, 1.9 to 2.2
seconds, or
when the timbre of the beeping waxed or shifted, or when there was a rare pause
in the
transmission-fans would write in and speculate about possible meanings. They
would clock
the frequency of the beeping and listen for discrepancies or numbers or voices
just beneath
the veil of sound. They would ferret out other subscribers to the newsletters
they received
and other members of the shortwave radio associations they belonged to and
share their
findings.
Even today, listening to UVB-76 is like listening to a world that hasn´t
existed for decades.
This feels especially true late at night when you´re in a dark basement,
headset on,
enveloped by all the pops and whirs and snippets of anonymous voices from other
signals
seeping across the airwaves-"these little trips into fantasy," as Room641A puts
it, that
"happen when you are sitting in front of your receiver passing by Radio Havana
at 3 in the
morning."
Most observers believe that UVB-76 is an idiosyncratic example of what´s called
a numbers
station, used to communicate encrypted messages to spies or other agents.
Typically, these
stations transmit numbers in groups of five, making it impossible to detect
partitions between
words and sentences. The numbers can be decoded using a key in the possession
of the
intended listener. Numbers stations are thought to have existed since World War
I, as
documented by the Conet Project, a compilation of recordings that was first
released in 1997.
(Director Cameron Crowe, a fan of the Conet Project, used samples from it in
his 2001 film
Vanilla Sky.) Drug runners are believed to have used numbers stations on
occasion; so too
are the North Koreans, the Americans, the Cubans, and the British. Indeed,
shortwave
hobbyists suspect MI6 was behind the most famous numbers station on the planet,
the
much-revered Lincolnshire Poacher.
An online group calling itself Enigma 2000 (the first part is an acronym for
the European
Numbers Information Gathering and Monitoring Association) collects data about
numbers
stations around the world. Jochen Scha"fer, who heads the group´s German
branch, says of
UVB-76, "It´s no typical numbers station, but it is one." Usually, he says,
numbers stations
begin their transmissions with a call sign, then move on to a specially
produced
introduction-the Lincolnshire Poacher, for example, got its moniker because
every
broadcast kicked off with the first two bars of the English folk song with the
same
name-before they start broadcasting numbers. "This station is different because
of its
structure," Scha"fer says. "Most of the time, there is just the buzzing tone...
The messages
come at irregular times."
But this anomalous format has prompted some UVB-76 listeners to suggest that it
is not a
numbers station at all. One former high-ranking European official and longtime
student of
Soviet jamming of Western radio stations, known to his fellow UVB-76 fans as
"JM,"
maintains that the Buzzer´s purpose is to transmit coded orders to military
units within
Russia, not to spies outside its borders. JM notes that most of what has been
pieced together
about the station´s specs-its frequency of 4625 kHz, its main 20-kilowatt
transmitter, its 5-
kilowatt backup transmitter, and its horizontal-dipole antenna-points to
conventional, military
use. Bryan Tabares, a 21-year-old production engineer in Jacksonville, Florida,
agrees and
puts forward an even more innocuous theory to explain the disruptions of 2010:
He believes it
was merely "pink noise" manufactured by sound engineers to calibrate audio
equipment.
That´s all. "Everything that´s happened points to an equipment upgrade or
calibration,"
Tabares says.
Photo: Sergey Kozmin
One of several abandoned structures near the radio tower in Povarovo.
Photo: Sergey Kozmin
Boender, the financial consultant near Rotterdam, says he is now confident that
UVB-76 is
controlled by the military. He bases this conclusion on his analysis of known
Russian military
stations. That type of sleuthing seems to be a large part of the appeal for him
and other
shortwave aficionados. He gives another example: "We discovered a Russian
network in the
early ´90s, but it took us a couple of years before we actually found out who
they were. It
appeared to be a network of Soviet embassies, consulates, ministries, and most
likely also
the KGB and GRU [Russia's largest foreign intelligence agency]. A number of
people around
the globe listened, and we exchanged messages and recordings and analyzed them
until we
finally discovered who they were." He adds, "That´s what makes it fun."
It took a 37-year-old computer engineer in Tallinn, Estonia, to drag UVB-76
into the Internet
era. In the process, Andrus Aaslaid has expanded the station´s audience in a
way that no
devoted listener could have anticipated. Aaslaid´s office is the third-floor
attic of a stonework
building on a quiet street in the center of the Baltic city. From the kitchen
in the attic, he can
see, about 20 feet away, the apartment he shares with his family, which takes
up the top floor
of a former boardinghouse built in 1897. Though Aaslaid isn´t well known
internationally,
inside Estonia he´s something of a poster boy for the local tech scene, which
has produced
not only giants like Skype but a slew of rapidly growing startups. In the early
´90s, Aaslaid
launched his first company, LaidWare, providing banks with ATM-networking
systems. Then
he ran a firm that was acquired by the quartet behind Skype. Then he did a
stint in Silicon
Valley. After that he served as an adviser to two Estonian economic-affairs and
communications ministers, including Andrus Ansip, the country´s current prime
minister. Like
many entrepreneurs, Aaslaid has a frenetic quality, and he resists convention:
He got married
to the mother of his children in 2010, when his daughter was 6 and his son was
4. He has a
hard time staying at a job for more than a year. He dropped out of university
after two
months. ("I was already working as a programmer," he says. "We were the first
wave to learn
it hands-on. You didn´t need a degree.")
Natalia never strays through the wrought-iron fence. On the other side is the
radio tower, and
no one, she says, ever goes there.
Aaslaid discovered shortwave radio as a young boy, and even today, when he
talks about the
UVB-76 Internet relay, he sounds a little like a teenager, fascinated by a
world he does not
quite understand. He turns on his receiver and we listen for a few minutes to
random sound
fragments: a peace activist talking about "rediscovering Hiroshima," a Russian
newscaster
describing carnage in the Gaza Strip, the tail end of a song by Supertramp.
"I´ve spent nights
just randomly browsing and sometimes getting really, really drunk," Aaslaid
says. (His drink
of choice is Aberlour A´bunadh, a single-malt Scotch.) "In the era of the
Internet and
corporations, people´s lives are so well planned and predictable," he says. "In
some ways,
UVB-76 represents the good kind of unpredictability and mystery."
Hooking up the relay was technologically simple but physically challenging. To
make his
antenna, he scrounged up 230 feet of copper-plated wire and in the middle of
the night strung
it between the roof of his office and the roof of his apartment building, going
back and forth
several times. Then he hooked up his shortwave scanner to his computer. To
handle the
streaming audio, he used a British service provider called MixStream. Several
weeks later,
he upgraded to a custom-built magnetic loop antenna and swapped out his scanner
for a
software-based radio.
Over the next six months, 200,000 listeners from scores of countries dropped
in. Like any
good shortwave junkie, Aaslaid watches the watchers-noting that, after the US,
the number-
two source of interest is Russia. Aaslaid says he´s received numerous email
messages from
artists and musicians who said the Buzzer had inspired them. X-Ray Press, a
"math rock"
band in Seattle, released an album this year called UVB-76, which features
Buzzer-like
buzzing in the background. Sherri Miller and Mario Fanone, two electronic
musicians in
Buffalo, New York, did them one better by naming their band UVB-76 and starting
each live
set with a brief sample of the Buzzer. Fanone plays a Casio digital guitar and
a trumpet, while
Miller generally plays a Korg Electribe, though sometimes she plays a vacuum
cleaner,
running its whoosh through an effects pedal to enhance its sound.
Aaslaid remains fascinated. "It has transmitted voice messages, it has been
mute, its
frequency has been hijacked by pirates, it has run through the maintenance with
all the
related voice messages and test runs, it´s had loads of strange noises,
transmitted 24 hours
with extremely high power all around the world," writes Aaslaid, in a typically
rapturous email
about just what the station means to him. "Therefore I have fallen for it!"
When I ask him why
anyone cares about UVB-76, and why they should care about shortwave in general,
he
replies by invoking the universal connectivity that this primitive technology
allows, even in
places far from a cell tower. "Imagine somebody with a Morse key or a
reel-to-reel tape deck
in the middle of the Namibia desert, running a shortwave transmitter off a
diesel generator
and sending music or messages toward the ionosphere. In the middle of the
night, it does not
get any more spiritual than that."
A new intrigue about UVB-76-or MDZhB-is the question of its location. Soon
after the
upheavals of August and September 2010, with all the stopping and starting and
knocking
and whispering, shortwave listeners reported another remarkable shift: The
station´s position
seemed to have moved. JM, the former European official, has since helped trace
its rough
location to near the town of Pskov, close to Russia´s border with Estonia. But
no one has
been able to triangulate exactly where the broadcast is coming from. Ary
Boender theorizes
that the move was related to a Russian military reorganization that took place
that
September, when the Moscow and Leningrad military districts were merged to form
a new
command center in St. Petersburg-which would explain why UVB-76, too, might
have
migrated hundreds of miles northwest. For the foreseeable future, though, the
site of the
transmitter has been added to the long list of its enduring mysteries.
Today, the mini military city in Povarovo, from which the cipher broadcast for
so many
decades, is nearly abandoned. The surrounding village is a gray-brown tapestry
of
Communist apartment buildings, recently built dachas, and babushkas hawking
honey and
cucumbers. Around the voyenni gorodok,there are gates and walls and
signs-military
vehicles only-but no guards or electrified fences, and the gates are not
locked. The only
activity is near the housing blocks filled with the wives and children and
grandchildren of
Soviet veterans, living and dead. "This was like paradise," says one resident,
Natalia, whose
late husband, Sergey Nikolayevich, served as driver to the commander of the
voyenni
gorodok. When asked about the looming wrought-iron fence roughly a hundred feet
from the
entrance to her apartment building, she says she never strays through its
gates. On the other
side is the radio tower, and no one, according to Natalia, ever goes there.
The one-lane road that leads to the tower stretches about a quarter mile past a
handful of
empty buildings and a thick pine forest. A chain-link fence, supported by stone
posts capped
with moss, surrounds the tower. Between 100 and 150 feet tall, it´s red and
white and rusting,
with three or four satellite dishes attached to it. Next to the tower are a
blue shed, a green
metal hut stuffed with wires and electrical equipment, and an ancient stone
structure that´s
also overgrown with moss. And there appears to be a large underground facility:
The muddy
pitch on which the tower stands is riddled with metal cylinders (presumably
ventilation shafts)
rising out of the ground, and there is a very small pink building that looks
like the entrance to
a descending staircase. Also, there´s a door that´s partially ajar on the side
of the stone
structure. If you open it and peer inside, you´ll see a black hole where there
must have been
a ladder several years or decades ago, and if you drop a rock in this hole, it
will take about a
second to reach the bottom-whatever is down there is at least 32 feet
belowground.
Just beyond the chain-link fence and the radio tower is another building, which
is one story
and also pink. There is a large antenna outside, and a tree, and a barking mutt
leashed to a
cable that´s strung from the tree to the building. The setup is such that if
you were to
approach the front door, you would enter the jurisdiction, so to speak, of the
dog, which barks
endlessly and ferociously, as if he has been beaten.
The front door appears to be locked. There is no light on inside; no one comes
in or out. But
someone has been here. The dog, after all, must be fed.
Peter Savodnik (petersavodnik.com) is a freelance journalist and the author of
a forthcoming
book, The Interloper, about Lee Harvey Oswald´s time in Soviet Russia.Standard
rig : ICOM
R75 / 2x16 V / m@h40 heads Sennheiser
Please read and distribute this 15 year research article
http://tinyurl.com/5vzg7e
Please read my article on SINPO at http://tinyurl.com/yt7qjd
________________________
http://zlgr.multiply.com (radio monitoring site plus audio clips ) MAIN SITE
http://www.delicious.com/gr_greek1/@zach (all mypages !!)
........
Zacharias Liangas , Thessaloniki Greece
greekdx @ otenet dot gr ---
Pesawat penerima: ICOM R75 , Lowe HF150 , Degen 1102,1103,108,
Tecsun PL200/550, Chibo c300/c979, Yupi 7000
Antenna: 16m hor, 2x16 m V invert, 1m australian loop
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