Better take some recordings to play back in case the "Dead Hand" theory is correct.
Could be a movie idea for a post-apocalyptic world where one crazy old nerd living in a trailer has been holding off annihilation and looks for someone to pass the torch to before he dies (reminiscent of Deccan Ribobe in Pratchett's Moving Pictures).
They are also transmitting codewords one or twice per week. A trivial part of the dead hand protocol would be to verify that the codewords progress according to schedule or the determined order.
The dead hand theory is almost certainly incorrect, because the transmission is fairly unreliable and regularly experiences technical faults or goes off the air entirely.
time delay. would have been silly to build a system that triggers instantly, seeing as a geomagnetic storm or whatever would initiate nuclear annihilation
Sure, but how do you balance the time between that needed for recovery from a Carington-level event, and leaving it too long such that the adversary has taken out your silos and subs?
I would speculate it's not a one part scheme. First, a network of international spies would surface, then they could do whatever, even use the enemy nuclear weapons against them
> The Carrington Event was the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, peaking from 1 to 2 September 1859 during solar cycle 10. It created strong auroral displays that were reported globally and caused sparking and even fires in multiple telegraph stations.
The whole point of having subs is that they are meant to be stealthy and survive the initial strike. If you took them out it's game over and the dead hand system is useless.
The frequency is similar to those which are typically being used for that kind of task (Germany has shut down one of the biggest time sync radio station recently).
For me it seems like a test for a wave pass, I mean if you want to send a message to some submarine via radio wave but have some hesitation whether the message reach the receiver, no callbacks are allowed for obvious reasons.
> It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, “MDZhB”, that no-one has ever claimed to run. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone.
That takes wattage. Someone pays the electricity bill. Follow the money and you have the operator.
There is a bill, it is paid, too. Russians leave a LOT of papertrail on all their operations, including military and secret service, you just can't always see (aren't allowed to see) the papers.
I love the comment on the video pointing out that the sound started as a beep and has gotten drawn out over the years.
Some old machinery in a closet somewhere slowly failing. Wonder if it's some worn out capacitors in the noise generator or an old tape reel (latter doesn't seem reliable enough IMO).
I must cry foul on the “dead man switch” theory (dead hand). I think maybe in 2020 pre-ukraine war it would have been plausible to imagine the russian military could maintain such an elaborate system out of the ashes of a crumbling soviet era, but it seems like their nuclear infra is likely crumbling if their main military force in ukraine is any indication.
Given the fact as well this signal routinely goes offline, seems very debunkable.
The article is being a bit overly mysterious. The radio station exists as part of a Russian military communication network. Here's a website that documents the communication format and logs messages: https://priyom.org/military-stations/russia
They aren’t in anyway exclusively Russian for the record but the Russians might be one of the last to still be using them in practice though.
Not because it doesn’t work but because it requires the end user to have access to specialist equipment which is quite unusual and hard to explain away and there are other ways to do the same thing that don’t have the same limitations.
But just to be clear for anyone not familiar with this, what you’re hearing is the a message that was encoded using a one time pad and the reason it’s delivered in this quirky format is that it has certain properties that are ideal for clandestine work in dangerous areas where you need to pass a message over an open channel but you need to make sure that if anyone intercepts the message there is no information in there that will give any clues to the contents of the message or the intended recipient (I.e this second property is why encrypted email for example isn’t a suitable replacement).
Beyond that there isn’t really anything that special about it. They are the two properties it provides and that’s the message it’s delivering.
By way of a final example another famous one might be taking an ad in the classifieds section of a newspaper back in the day.
The end user knows where to look and what message they are looking for but nobody beyond the sender and the recipient know that the ad is even a message with another meaning to begin with, unlike the numbers station example however, that wouldn’t be appropriate for sending key material or an OTP encoded message (it needs to be random data) or anything beyond a very simple and low bandwidth message (I.e the operation is ready to start).
It really highlights the amazing security level of one time pads, that they can be comfortably doing secret announcements on a public radio channel with provably perfect security. (Assuming an adequate PRNG--for such small messages they could easily be using a hardware PRNG; I wonder.) Only issue is that you have to have all of your recipients keep track (and not leak) a pad that is at least as long as the data you intend to send.
Some other properties one time pads that might be less well known but are obvious when you think about them in the context of their use case.
They are very cumbersome to use in real life, encrypting and decrypting is done by hand, it’s error prone as a result and very slow. Nobody likes using them at all.
The part you mentioned about the keeping track of and not leaking it also isn’t really an issue so much in reality.
What you hear on the radio isn’t actually that sensitive on its own hence why it’s happily sent in the clear without the key material to decipher it.
The pads themselves are however highly guarded secrets, usually passed along via a dead drop, only ever exposed to the minimum of people and designed to be very easy to destroy quickly and are a bit flimsy as a result.
But destroying the pad is a part of the whole “how to receive a message securely” process that they go through so it never exists to be used as evidence beyond the time that it’s actually useful.
Also the people handling them are highly trained and trusted individuals who are extremely motivated to be very sensible while working with them as the entire reason you would use a method like this in particular is usually because you will be tortured and shot if discovered.
This is ironically also why it doesn’t make sense usually for that person to have access to and know how to use a shortwave radio. If you get caught with that equipment your fate might be the same either way.
Some fun trivia: the British as far back as the 50s I believe did have some success where they had developed a system that allowed them to essentially use direction finding techniques but for radios that were tuned to a specific frequency even if they weren’t transmitting. It was known as Operation Rafter and is on Wikipedia.
One more example I’ll throw out there if you want to read a cool story is an account of how the ANC (the political group associated with Nelson Mandela) developed their own covert communications system with a lot of similar properties when they were trying to overthrow the apartheid government in South Africa during the 80s and 90s.
Supposedly the detector vans were a myth. A few appear to have been built, but they were essentially useless after 1950 as the interference from car ignitions started to become more of an issue. But the public didn't know that and the idea of it worked wonders for compliance. The BBC ran campaigns that implied huge fleets of them, but maybe there were only a few in reality.
At some point the BBC were forced under FOIA to admit they'd never prosecuted anyone using evidence from detector vans.
> The pads themselves are however highly guarded secrets, usually passed along via a dead drop, only ever exposed to the minimum of people and designed to be very easy to destroy quickly and are a bit flimsy as a result.
One other note here is that OTPs don’t have to be distributed in this manner. An OTP can use something already distributed and readily available to end users, such as a Gideon Bible or something (making sure to get the right edition, printing, etc) that everyone in a hotel room has access to. The key is having access to something, making sure it’s long enough for the series of messages to be encoded/decoded, and that no one else knows what it is.
I’m not actually a crypto guy and I know of stories where people have done this in serious environments (check the link I posted above for an example) but my understanding is that non random letter distributions like you will find in a book for example will potentially change the level of security you can expect from a OTP substantially against a sophisticated enemy and as a result the randomness is actually very important regardless of key length.
Oh yes, very true. An OTP must have particular properties that words in a book don’t have to be provably secure. However, common materials that the communicators have access to without specific distribution can be useful for OTPs in their own way (though not provably secure).
> An OTP must have particular properties that words in a book don’t have to be provably secure. However, common materials that the communicators have access to without specific distribution can be useful for OTPs in their own way (though not provably secure).
Using a passage from a book directly as an OTP is not secure at all. It's similar to the result of reusing an OTP: it gives an attacker two messages in (e.g.) English whose sum (using a book as an OTP) or difference (reused OTP) is known. Since the entropy of English is around a bit per character (more or less), and the deltas reveal almost lg(26) ~ 4.7 bits per character, knowing the sum or difference can determine most of the contents of the message in either case.
Reading every n'th letter in the book is probably marginally harder to break, but I still wouldn't rely on it for anything serious.
Instead of using every n'th letter, how about using a pseudo random number sequence generated by a simple math equation, like the one posted here a few days ago[1], and add that to every letter. With that the data should be shuffled basically beyond recognition though the effort needed to decode has increased even more.
The way I've seen it used in TV shows, there'd be a number somewhere (embedded, or day of month the message was sent, etc) that indicates what page of the book to use.
What you're describing is a book cypher and is a separate thing from an One Time Pad. They can be fairly secure but they're not inherently as secure as one time pads.
> They are very cumbersome to use in real life, encrypting and decrypting is done by hand, it’s error prone as a result and very slow. Nobody likes using them at all.
Twitter has the undesirable property that it's possible to find who is looking at a particular tweet (or user), unlike broadcast mediums such as radio or magazine classifieds, which present a much larger haystack.
A lot of botnets work this way where they will use something like Twitter or Reddit as a command and control channel but not a thing you would want to rely on if being identified might mean your life.
> A lot of botnets work this way where they will use something like Twitter or Reddit as a command and control channel but not a thing you would want to rely on if being identified might mean your life.
It absolutely is if it doesn’t fit with the rest of your pattern of life.
I think you need to understand the context here. This isn’t a scenario where a friend casually asks you what’s with the radio.
This is where you are most likely going to have to have have a damn compelling reason why you have this while taking a beating from a team of very motivated counter intelligence professionals and your story needs to stand up to a huge amount of very detailed scrutiny under some pretty shitty circumstances.
Usually by the time they know you have the radio depending on where you are you probably aren’t going home at that point.
There’s a famous case of this called the TRIGON case when the US were doing this in the Cold War to communicate with a guy in the Soviet ministry of foreign affairs. There was no talking your way out of it once they knew the radio existed.
There’s some interesting interviews with the CIA officers who were running him in Moscow at the time where they go into a lot of the details. Marti Peterson is the name of the person you should go looking for if you want to know more.
Like I said, this communications network is for military use, not clandestine use. There's no defined transmission schedule and the radio signals aren't transmitted at a high enough power for good signal strength outside Russia.
This stuff fascinates me for some reason. I remember in high school a story I read about a telegraph operator that sent a message to someone from a local (who, according to the story was believed to be a spy) during WWII; something along the lines "FATHER IS DEAD." Later that day a reply came back, "IS FATHER DEAD OR DECEASED."
That really amped up the fascination gene in me =D
During the early stages of the Syrian civil war, when there was significant pressure being put on the Western world to directly intervene with boots on the ground, the BBC fabricated a documentary about a napalm attack on a school. This documentary was called "Saving Syria's Children."
This featured doctors (and medical staff) being directly linked to Syrian opposition groups[1] (with their voices being dubbed[2], originals still on BBC), actors unintentionally exposing themselves[3], Syrian opposition fighters claiming the attack never took place[4] and when all of this was reported to the BBC they decided to simply memory hole the event and take down the documentary from YouTube, as well as some effort in taking down YouTube videos uploaded by others that feature some of the content.
It's worth comparing the footage from the documentary to a historical napalm victim footage[5] from Egypt which shows the severity of napalm attacks in comparison to what we see in the documentary.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm far from being supportive of the Syrian government or unaware of their shocking actions during the conflict, but this entire production was a theatrical construction by the BBC.
I kind of figured when I read the title. Triangulating a radio source works well and is very easy to do. The story of any “mystery” really needs to be built up.
This isn't a great article. The Russian military unambiguously operates this, and there are pictures of the instructions on what frequency to use to listen to messages on it:
The Russian wikipedia article sheds a lot light on why this exists. With it operated and maintained by the army, and the majority of messages transmitted in the working hours, this is to verify through the logs of receiving radio operators, that the random message been correctly heard, received and logged. Which means the operator was ready at any given time and fully awake/operational, to hear other real important transmissions.
This is busywork. Countries that value efficiency shut down similar operations decades ago. Oil rich country pouring money to military doesn't ask "is this still useful", and the people working on it have no motivation explain their superiors that their own job is useless. Either you end up without job or you are reassigned to attack some village in Ukraine...
> This is busywork. Countries that value efficiency shut down similar operations decades ago.
IMHO, those countries are stupid. IIRC, the CIA "valued efficiency" and switched to internet based communications, which are so easy to monitor that most of their agents in China and Iran got killed/captured.
Radio has the unique benefit that it's pretty much impossible to monitor reception.
As best as I can tell they had people designing their tradecraft who really did not properly understand how the internet works not because they are incompetent but because the agency mentality is so heavily focused on compartmentalisation (which is ironic because a lack of compartmentalisation across systems is what ultimately screwed them here) that it was considered to be good enough by people who weren’t in a position to make that call and bringing in further experts to validate it violated the “need to know” aspect.
I think that was a huge wake up call for those folks, when things go that badly they will end up rebuilding a lot of the people process and technology from the ground up.
But for what it’s worth some of the websites in question are still available on archive.org if I recall correctly.
But I don’t agree with the conclusion that the answer is use radio instead. I think a lot of things have changed in that world in the past 10-20 years and lots of things that were previously considered “best practice” suddenly became unambiguous signals that you were up to something that warrants a closer look.
For example: biometrics mostly killed the idea of operating undercover means traveling on a passport issued in a fake name. There’s a LOT of these changes but that’s an easy one that everyone intuitively understands.
I wonder if 2 way satellite comms is just as effective as this old technique. The satellite sends mircowaves over a large area so isn't giving a location away. Tracking would be extremely hard.
Difficult to transport, high power usage and requires a specific view of the sky. SW radios can be acquired easily most anywhere. It’s just your vintage set that’s usually tuned to the local music station.
The reason satellites aren't used is their location is known, and because of this they are easily jammed or listened to. I'm not sure that the reasons you gave are really valid, especially for reception.
> Difficult to transport
I transmit to low earth satellites each weekend using a hand held radio that fits in a jeans pocket.
> high power usage
I use about 5w.
> radios can be acquired easily most anywhere
You can easily buy a radio that can do this for $20 on Amazon.
I don't need a specific view of the sky on passes where the satellite is high enough in the sky, which happens one or two times a day.
Reminds me of US’s “HFGCS”[0] which also sends [apparently] OTP’s, though from many stations (and on multiple frequencies) simultaneously.
I imagine the continuous “buzzer” sound from the Russian station acts as both a way to keep the frequency in use, but also so that listening stations can determine if they are able to receive the Buzzer station properly. Easier to tune in if you have a constant carrier (or whatever) to look for.
HFGCS is far more "interesting" to listen to than numbers stations because there's actual traffic. It's also transmitted from multiple locations, so it's much more likely you'll be able to get a signal. Google a WebSDR and get to listening!
oh yeah, I've heard a couple HFGCS transmissions w/my Yaesu FT-857D[0]! It's especially ominous-souding when the sound "echoes" because you're picking up more than one station simultaneously, each at a substantially different distance!
Check-out The Conet Project [1] for recordings of "numbers stations" made in the 90s. The 4 CD set used to be freely downloadable, but this doesn't seem to be the case anymore - although a quick search indicates that there are full and partial copies available from various sources.
I thought it would be neat to have a physical copy, but holy crap: they're selling the second-to-last copy the have on hand for $5,000: https://irdial.com/conet.htm.
They should really just reissue the thing, that's ridiculous.
this had a roundabout way of helping me pick my amateur radio vanity callsign (N7YHF) a few years ago... the Wilco took "yankee hotel foxtrot" from the Conet recordings (in sample form and by naming an album after it). I thought it sounded cool.
A bit different but not totally unrelated: for years there's been one in Belgium/Brussels which would play 24/7... Three songs. One of them was Hotel California by The Eagles, another one was a Michael Jackson song and the third one I forgot. They'd loop, all day long, all week long, all year long: three songs and that's it.
I never looked into it but it was weird.
Wife and I both are our cars with one the channel set to that frequency and we'd sometimes listen to that station.
It really grinds my gears when people use "nation state" to mean country, but it happens so often I don't usually bother to comment. Belgium is the very opposite of a nation state, and anyone familiar with its history or modern politics can see that.
There are all sorts of strange stations like this. I know of one that has been broadcasting "testing 1 2 3 4 5 5 4 3 2 1" for at least five years, but on FM. IMHO whoever is running these is simply dominating a frequency to keep others off, holding the channel for some future or possibly forgotten use.
Why is this hard? Onetime pad encrypted communications from spymasters to spys. Tune in with a radio from anywhere in the world. Hear your keyword and follow the instructions you memorized before leaving home. No equipment to be caught with, no return communication to be intercepted.
103 comments
[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadCould be a movie idea for a post-apocalyptic world where one crazy old nerd living in a trailer has been holding off annihilation and looks for someone to pass the torch to before he dies (reminiscent of Deccan Ribobe in Pratchett's Moving Pictures).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z3fgJCJ_daE
LOST?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
Cheap alarm clocks just use the AC power as a known good oscillator.
What if the Buzzer were simply a wireless version of this? (Instead of exotic atomic clocks or OXCOs)
I’m not saying this is technically a really good idea, but as a cheap, fairly low-tech solution — why not ?
For me it seems like a test for a wave pass, I mean if you want to send a message to some submarine via radio wave but have some hesitation whether the message reach the receiver, no callbacks are allowed for obvious reasons.
That takes wattage. Someone pays the electricity bill. Follow the money and you have the operator.
Some old machinery in a closet somewhere slowly failing. Wonder if it's some worn out capacitors in the noise generator or an old tape reel (latter doesn't seem reliable enough IMO).
Given the fact as well this signal routinely goes offline, seems very debunkable.
Not because it doesn’t work but because it requires the end user to have access to specialist equipment which is quite unusual and hard to explain away and there are other ways to do the same thing that don’t have the same limitations.
But just to be clear for anyone not familiar with this, what you’re hearing is the a message that was encoded using a one time pad and the reason it’s delivered in this quirky format is that it has certain properties that are ideal for clandestine work in dangerous areas where you need to pass a message over an open channel but you need to make sure that if anyone intercepts the message there is no information in there that will give any clues to the contents of the message or the intended recipient (I.e this second property is why encrypted email for example isn’t a suitable replacement).
Beyond that there isn’t really anything that special about it. They are the two properties it provides and that’s the message it’s delivering.
By way of a final example another famous one might be taking an ad in the classifieds section of a newspaper back in the day.
The end user knows where to look and what message they are looking for but nobody beyond the sender and the recipient know that the ad is even a message with another meaning to begin with, unlike the numbers station example however, that wouldn’t be appropriate for sending key material or an OTP encoded message (it needs to be random data) or anything beyond a very simple and low bandwidth message (I.e the operation is ready to start).
They are very cumbersome to use in real life, encrypting and decrypting is done by hand, it’s error prone as a result and very slow. Nobody likes using them at all.
The part you mentioned about the keeping track of and not leaking it also isn’t really an issue so much in reality.
What you hear on the radio isn’t actually that sensitive on its own hence why it’s happily sent in the clear without the key material to decipher it.
The pads themselves are however highly guarded secrets, usually passed along via a dead drop, only ever exposed to the minimum of people and designed to be very easy to destroy quickly and are a bit flimsy as a result.
But destroying the pad is a part of the whole “how to receive a message securely” process that they go through so it never exists to be used as evidence beyond the time that it’s actually useful.
Also the people handling them are highly trained and trusted individuals who are extremely motivated to be very sensible while working with them as the entire reason you would use a method like this in particular is usually because you will be tortured and shot if discovered.
This is ironically also why it doesn’t make sense usually for that person to have access to and know how to use a shortwave radio. If you get caught with that equipment your fate might be the same either way.
Some fun trivia: the British as far back as the 50s I believe did have some success where they had developed a system that allowed them to essentially use direction finding techniques but for radios that were tuned to a specific frequency even if they weren’t transmitting. It was known as Operation Rafter and is on Wikipedia.
One more example I’ll throw out there if you want to read a cool story is an account of how the ANC (the political group associated with Nelson Mandela) developed their own covert communications system with a lot of similar properties when they were trying to overthrow the apartheid government in South Africa during the 80s and 90s.
It’s a great read https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv03445...
If they used a technique which essentially was considered military secret not too long ago. (Compared to the time when the vans started to appear.)
At some point the BBC were forced under FOIA to admit they'd never prosecuted anyone using evidence from detector vans.
One other note here is that OTPs don’t have to be distributed in this manner. An OTP can use something already distributed and readily available to end users, such as a Gideon Bible or something (making sure to get the right edition, printing, etc) that everyone in a hotel room has access to. The key is having access to something, making sure it’s long enough for the series of messages to be encoded/decoded, and that no one else knows what it is.
I might be wrong, it’s not my area of expertise.
Good clarification.
Using a passage from a book directly as an OTP is not secure at all. It's similar to the result of reusing an OTP: it gives an attacker two messages in (e.g.) English whose sum (using a book as an OTP) or difference (reused OTP) is known. Since the entropy of English is around a bit per character (more or less), and the deltas reveal almost lg(26) ~ 4.7 bits per character, knowing the sum or difference can determine most of the contents of the message in either case.
Reading every n'th letter in the book is probably marginally harder to break, but I still wouldn't rely on it for anything serious.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39091867
There's no need for that to be true.
For example, comments on Britney Spears' Instagram page: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/russi...
I think you need to understand the context here. This isn’t a scenario where a friend casually asks you what’s with the radio.
This is where you are most likely going to have to have have a damn compelling reason why you have this while taking a beating from a team of very motivated counter intelligence professionals and your story needs to stand up to a huge amount of very detailed scrutiny under some pretty shitty circumstances.
Usually by the time they know you have the radio depending on where you are you probably aren’t going home at that point.
There’s a famous case of this called the TRIGON case when the US were doing this in the Cold War to communicate with a guy in the Soviet ministry of foreign affairs. There was no talking your way out of it once they knew the radio existed.
There’s some interesting interviews with the CIA officers who were running him in Moscow at the time where they go into a lot of the details. Marti Peterson is the name of the person you should go looking for if you want to know more.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station
That really amped up the fascination gene in me =D
Crying shame that post-truth is the norm for major news outlets. UK is becoming the US.
This featured doctors (and medical staff) being directly linked to Syrian opposition groups[1] (with their voices being dubbed[2], originals still on BBC), actors unintentionally exposing themselves[3], Syrian opposition fighters claiming the attack never took place[4] and when all of this was reported to the BBC they decided to simply memory hole the event and take down the documentary from YouTube, as well as some effort in taking down YouTube videos uploaded by others that feature some of the content.
It's worth comparing the footage from the documentary to a historical napalm victim footage[5] from Egypt which shows the severity of napalm attacks in comparison to what we see in the documentary.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm far from being supportive of the Syrian government or unaware of their shocking actions during the conflict, but this entire production was a theatrical construction by the BBC.
[0] https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/
[1] https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/#Rola
[2] https://youtu.be/puaOvmiyunM?t=39
[3] https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/#Dutch
[4] https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/#comma...
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS4srZ_iWzM
https://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-O5t8V39LpJRaSz5h-gt5rZA-t500x...
IMHO, those countries are stupid. IIRC, the CIA "valued efficiency" and switched to internet based communications, which are so easy to monitor that most of their agents in China and Iran got killed/captured.
Radio has the unique benefit that it's pretty much impossible to monitor reception.
There’s an outline of it here worth checking out https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/15/botched-cia-communicati...
As best as I can tell they had people designing their tradecraft who really did not properly understand how the internet works not because they are incompetent but because the agency mentality is so heavily focused on compartmentalisation (which is ironic because a lack of compartmentalisation across systems is what ultimately screwed them here) that it was considered to be good enough by people who weren’t in a position to make that call and bringing in further experts to validate it violated the “need to know” aspect.
I think that was a huge wake up call for those folks, when things go that badly they will end up rebuilding a lot of the people process and technology from the ground up.
But for what it’s worth some of the websites in question are still available on archive.org if I recall correctly.
But I don’t agree with the conclusion that the answer is use radio instead. I think a lot of things have changed in that world in the past 10-20 years and lots of things that were previously considered “best practice” suddenly became unambiguous signals that you were up to something that warrants a closer look.
For example: biometrics mostly killed the idea of operating undercover means traveling on a passport issued in a fake name. There’s a LOT of these changes but that’s an easy one that everyone intuitively understands.
No, this is national-security-grade redundancy. Via a system which has extremely few ways to fail, and those are all well-understood.
Countries that value efficiency probably migrated their operations to Office 365...OOPS!
I remember being a bit fascinated by this when I first heard of it a few years ago.
> Difficult to transport
I transmit to low earth satellites each weekend using a hand held radio that fits in a jeans pocket.
> high power usage
I use about 5w.
> radios can be acquired easily most anywhere
You can easily buy a radio that can do this for $20 on Amazon.
I don't need a specific view of the sky on passes where the satellite is high enough in the sky, which happens one or two times a day.
https://www.outfittersatellite.com/Countries-with-Satellite-...
There are occasional voice messages on this frequency, e.g.,
https://soundcloud.com/danix111/uvb-76-2010-11-11-14-00-utc
If you're interested in The Buzzer, it's probably best just to read the Wikipedia article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76
I imagine the continuous “buzzer” sound from the Russian station acts as both a way to keep the frequency in use, but also so that listening stations can determine if they are able to receive the Buzzer station properly. Easier to tune in if you have a constant carrier (or whatever) to look for.
[0] https://priyom.org/military-stations/united-states/hfgcs
[0] https://matecha.net/posts/yaesu-ft857d-off-grid-portable-kit...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conet_Project
1-4 CD Set: https://archive.org/details/ird059
5th CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S5Xbb9_kVA
They should really just reissue the thing, that's ridiculous.
I never looked into it but it was weird.
Wife and I both are our cars with one the channel set to that frequency and we'd sometimes listen to that station.
Recorded here: https://www.reddit.com/r/britishcolumbia/comments/113civn/st...