UVB-76

S

Starseeker

Vault Senior Citizen
I was reading Wired and I found this article about this strange thing fairly suitable for NMA.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/09/ff_uvb76/

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.
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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.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvb_76

So, what's your take on it? There are links in the wiki post that will allow you to listen to it. Any Russians here care to speculate? It's a very intriguing story.
 
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Seriously, this is interesting, albeit I don't thing it is anything special. Many more stranger things have happened, so...
Still, for some reason, it feels relaxing when listening to feed on their website.
 
I love number stations.
I'm pretty sure the Dead Hand didn't work like that in real life. As far as I know, it enabled other Commanders to launch full scale attacks in case the leadership got destroyed.
 
Mom did a tour up in Canadian Forces Base Alert, in the Arctic. She told me a good complement of the base was composed of intelligence officers, kept away from the rest of them. I wonder if that's he sort of thing they were up there for (baring limits of transmission, of course).

There was an episode of Supernatural involving a number station . . . that kills!

Internet Relay: http://uvb-76.net/
 
Hassknecht said:
I love number stations.
I'm pretty sure the Dead Hand didn't work like that in real life. As far as I know, it enabled other Commanders to launch full scale attacks in case the leadership got destroyed.
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yeah well what I have read is that it was not running all the time either. Only in situations where they expected attacks. Together with sensors and measuring stations it would collect informations like seismic data and pressure around moscow (or the whole USSR ?). As soon some nuclear weapon would hit the Soviet Union the system would immediately lunch all weapons in the direction of the enemy. So it was more some kind of back up system and it seems not to have been a part of the deterrence policy (since the US didn't really knew that much about it and weapons for deterrence only work if you know they are really there). But that is just what I have read.
 
There has been a story going around that in Fallout 3 you could turn Three Dog's station into a numbers station.
 
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