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Comment by mopsi | Hacker News Reader

In Russian-speaking world, the function of UVB-76 is known and scans of expired codebooks have been posted online. Long story short: it's a military communications system that uses one-time pads. Military units monitor transmissions and use unique decoding sheets to translate random numbers and keywords into messages such as "readiness level 1" or "execute action 5". It's mainly a backup system intended for use when everything else fails, because even off-the-shelf hand-cranked consumer radios would enough to receive messages, given the right decoding sheets. The amount of radio traffic on the station has usually seen an uptick during major military exercises.

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Why are there sometimes strange artifacts heard on the channel?

Is that a hoax, interference or something else?

Backup communication systems like this are often implemented with the most basic of components to increase reliability and ease of use in stressful situations.

The trade off is sometimes human error happens. It isn't really a big deal since the messages themselves are encrypted inside of a secure facility then transmitted to a non-secure area that handles the actual broadcast (since it would be stupid to put a massive transmitter in the room with your super secrets).

So they’re broadcasting super-secret messages from their living rooms?

It could be a numbers station but (1) the known numerical messages are very short and (2) that wouldn’t explain why there is a buzzer.

My guess would be that the buzzer is so that the listeners know the station is still "up" and hasn't been destroyed

Or to keep the frequency free from other transmitters, as described in the article

The buzzer is there for both to mark the frequency and signal that it's alive. Its old sequence had a hourly faster buzz which returned to normal at the beginning of the hour. It looked like this

  X:59:00 - Buzzing gets faster.
  (X+1):00:00 - Normal buzzing resumes.

I think it served as a crude hourly sync signal for some systems until GLONASS came and provided atomic level sync. This also implies that there may be other non-human systems listening for this station.

It can be speculated that Russian Perimeter (Dead Hand) system [0] may be one of the listeners.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand

Would that mean that if the buzzing stops for an extended period, Dead Hand assumes World War 3 is underway and launches the missiles?

According to available information (and speculation), perimeter listens to various inputs (which is a good thing).

It's said that it has connections to seismic and pressure sensors and can check whether communication to critical infrastructure is intact. So it keeps tabs on many heart-beat signals it seems. UVB-76 might be one of them.

Moving a low traffic radio station with an interesting sound just because a bunch of HAM radio guys doesn't make sense. It has to have some higher function to warrant the move.

With the new over the horizon radar systems Russia is deploying, I guess that signals from these would be evaluated too.

Going in to wild speculation territory, Russia's in-house CPUs would fit the bill for these kind of systems nicely.

The Wikipedia article makes the operation of that station appear to be at a level that is far more relaxed than what I would expect from a really important continuous liveness signal. So I consider the use for something as lethal as the Dead Hand system unlikely, if it even still exists.

If I understood correctly, Dead Hand has many inputs and generally stays off so, maintenance won't create unintended consequences.

If whole system (and world's fate) relies on a single buzzer, we have much bigger problems :)

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