Russian number station UVB-76 went active last night.

reply to post by SuperSeeds


What an awesome topic OP, S&F for a really interesting thread! I've never been involved with HAM radios, but after reading this topic I'm definitely contemplating getting myself set up. It's amzing how "old" or "defunct" technologies still can play a CRUCIAL role in modern communications/intelligence

Just started watching The Americans (Russian spies in US c. 1981) & had my first HAM lesson 2 days ago. How very timely of a post, OP. Thank you.
By the way, follow the links to theWired magazine article, it has pictures & more info as someone above suggested.

If you're interested in numbers stations there's an ongoing project to catalog and trace these messages and their sources:Conet Project

Lots of cool recordings. Many are still active and anyone can listen in with a shortwave receiver or HAM radio.

I wouldnt get worried about the buzzer stopping. These nations play stupid games with each other all the time and it never means anything.

reply to post by Alienmojo


Are you on a Mac? I was using an iPad last night and there was a button to click called iOS, kind of to the upper right of the frequency / scrolling channel thing.

Time to ping this thread...

This stuff sounds crazy... So if these number stations are activated that means some deep agent is getting instructions on some mission they need to complete? This is like a Tom Clancy novel..

S & F

These are one time pad's. Unless you have their code book, no way are you going to decode it.

Nyiah
Yeah, it totally faded out within the last half hour

Shortwave radio is subject to a number of atmospheric attributes for long-range broadcast. In the 20-160 meter range, signals bounce off the ionosphere to travel around the globe. When conditions are right, especially in the 40 meter range, even weak signals can go to the other side of the earth.

So it's not unusual for regular broadcasts to fade in or completely out during the day.

Also, the ionosphere is a stronger "reflector" during times of high sunspot activity… we're not so high right now.

jhn7537
This stuff sounds crazy... So if these number stations are activated that means some deep agent is getting instructions on some mission they need to complete? This is like a Tom Clancy novel..

The Naval Intelligence guys in the ham radio club (late 1970's) had thousands of hours of tapes on two number stations. They did a presentation to the club showing that sudden alterations in the number sequences -- from random to much less random -- corresponded to known covert actions against NATO… and at least one suspected assassination.

They also found that speeding up (by about 20x) the tape during the apparent random periods produced a much-less random sounding morse code that was almost all correctly formed letters, word spaces, and punctuation. There would be a period of 40-50 well-formed coded characters, then random dots-dashes, followed by the same 40-50 characters.


These two guys claimed code-breaking wasn't their forte in N.I., but that the number stations were a curiosity of theirs… as it was for many hams at the time.

flucker
Hey guys, I have an update from my Russian speaking friend, and according to her she says that their speaking numbers and names.

Oh really now?

It's active now. Noon eastern in the US. Tried firing up the old Grundig but neighbours crappy plasma TV's just wreak havoc on the whole thing, ravaging my ears and S-meter. I will stick with Twente now. Though, I now remember why I hate playing radio living in apartments.

Thefarmer
This got me thinking what if like in wrestling when the two opponents huddle in and tell each other their next move

The superpowers are doin the same thing only on a larger scale using number stations?

CIA, KGB, and mi5 working together to bring about ww3?

Just a thought

This just blew my mind! I never thought of number stations being used as a means for opposing warring factions to "call spots" during the war!

so crazy, but sometimes the best plans are!

ae7wi
Hams (Ham Radio Operators) have know about this for years. I'm convinced that it has always been a ruse. Just something to keep the alphabet soup boys on their toes!

I don't know if it was the same station, but there used to be SW broadcasts where somebody would just speak out numbers in a monotone voice, "twenty-three, thirty seven, forty two, seven, eleven, nine, sixty-five, forty" for tens of minutes.

reply to post by TXRabbit


What are those images of? Creepy!

This is one of the main reasons I joined here nearly a decade ago.
Number stations are one of those things that pop up and linger in your brain for years.
It's always interesting when someone else discovers this and brings new data to look at.

Unfortunately, I tend to get mesmerized with scanning and listening to the point of losing hours while understanding nothing.
This is deinitely in my top 10 things I wish to understand if I had infinite resources.

reply to post by parad0x122


That's from LOST, the TV show.

JiggyPotamus
You would rather have your asset be able to use a standard consumer radio than to have any equipment that could be viewed as clandestine in nature. Having a receiver is not necessarily uncommon, but I would bet that it is something that could potentially be found and used as evidence in the event the asset is discovered. I'm not positive of any of this, but I'm just saying it is possible, and somewhat logical.

Once, and only once, I heard an obviously clandestine message at top of the hour on BBC World Service News. The announcer came on, made some kind of nonsensical, but clearly intentional sentence, repeated it with the usual perfect BBC articulation, and then started in with the usual "The news, from the BBC World Service."

I thought that whatever it was must have been very important to be worth changing a BBC broadcast---and to make the BBC do it, because it is fairly independent of the U.K. government.


These days, though, stegeanography in any of the billions of images and videos available on the internet could transmit much more useful information to anybody who has access.

reply to post by TXRabbit


Oh man....I totally should've recognized the numbers and the names. I was ADDICTED to that series, and really miss watching it. Lol, well played good sir

reply to post by SkepticOverlord


I'm replying to you, specifically, because you have experience in this. I just tuned in to this about 5 minutes ago and only heard an intermittent buzz. Until I heard a voice. It sounded like only a part of a word, like it was cut off.

Riddle me this, Overlord: Would it be possible to broadcast a broken message on more than one frequency that would then require a person tuning into those frequencies simultaneously in order to hear the actual message? Sort of like old-school encryption or like a radio paper shredder?

It is doing the pulsing alarm heard in the videos prior to the audible voice right now 1416EST

Yup tone is shifted down a couple steps. Something about to come through I imagine.
Edit to add: Yup... Seems random tones (data?) came through the lower tones.