priyom.org

Hey shortwave fans

I was interviewed by Russia Today a few weeks back, were guessing that the Wired article promoted interest from the Russian media and RT wanted to get in on the UVB-76 action. There is an online article about the buzzer and a short news segment. So for those of you curious what I look like have a watch:

2 buzzers can it be?

There has long been speculation that there are 2 or more transmitter sites for the buzzer. Conflicting reception reports, people saying the buzzer did not switch off when a message occured and other reports have often left us scratching our heads in explanation. Yesterday we heard a test count broadcast on the buzzers frequency while the buzzer was still running. This could be mixed at the broadcast source of course and offers no proof... until today!

We can clearly see in the above spectrum image a second buzzer being activated which is slightly off frequency and slowly creeps onto the 4.625 kHz expected.

S28 The Buzzer UVB-76 Two buzzer oddity

We finnally caught them! This is fantastic news as it explains many oddities about the buzzer and casts doubt on a few. As always UVB-76 never fails to suprise and we are slowly learning more and more secrets about it. However this makes triangulation twice as hard...

We have been in contact with bydunai who has been taking trips to povarovo and has filmed and photographed his experience. Its great to actually speak to someone who has been to the site and we hope to get him on the podcast soon. His livejournel post is well worth a read:

A trip to povarovo and the UVB-76 site

We heard a jammer we had not heard this afternoon, sounding like a number of car alarms all going at once. So for now were calling it the "woo-woo" jammer. Broadcasting on 12140 kHz we think this was trying to jam Radio Free Asia, which is known to broadcast at that time. Have a listen:

*EDIT* This jammer is the Vietnamese Siren Jammer. Gwraspe*

Woo-Woo jammer blocking Radio Free Asia on 12140 kHz

Take my eye off the ball for a week or two, to do some more programming for the site and get a podcast done and stuff happens to fast for me to keep up with it all. We recorded a podcast a few nights back and finally managed to time it right to catch laid so he joined us for the podcast! We had a great discussion about being in wired magazine and we had the chance to ask him about setting up the repeater and his opinions on number stations, UVB-76 and the shortwave scene. N1ck joined us for the first time its always great when we get another member of the priyom team on the podcast. We have had a number of finds recently including x06 and xm whales so its a packed and interesting show.

I happened to be in Bowen's neighbour hood last weekend so we had the chance to have a mini priyom meetup. We enjoyed our afternoon in the pub and plan to have more priyom meetups in the future.

Avare recently found a post on the radioscanner.ru forum from a couple of guys who recently took a trip to the old site ar Povarovo, were still going over the posts and what to make of it, so more coming up on that soon!

Well once again the shortwave bands spring these little suprises on us.

X06 seems to be sending its test signal x06c and the odditiy x06b with catches almost every day since last thursday. That morning was particulary odd when we heard a sequence of x06 over 23 frequencies lasting no more than 30 seconds at a time over ten minutes. Quite an odd occurance indeed.

We also have new callsigns from UVB-76/The buzzer:

C38M/Ц38M and  CLIM/ЦЛИМ

There have been a series of early morning messages around 2-4am UTC so if your awake at that time (and many of you are) have a listen and you may catch one live. Interesting these early messages, looking back they are rare but always grouped at this 2-4am period. Interesting.

Keep those ears on the bands, its x06 hunting season!

Well we have to give massive thanks to Avare, Trojan and Danix for getting in contact with Jan owner of http://starbacks.ca/uvb76/

Jan dug through his archive recordings and managed to find the recording of the first known broadcast of UVB-76 from december the 24th, 1997.

S28-4625kHz-19971224-2100z BROMAL

Just getting this recording itself is a fantastic find, so many thanks to Jan for taking the time to find it and of course thanks again to Avare, Trojan and Danix for getting in contact with him and demonstrating more than a fleeting interest in obtaining the recording, their tenacity has reaped rewards!

More interestingly though all our Russian team members insist that the callsign is pronounced UZB-76, it seems our V could be a mistake. Now having listened to the recording myself, I certainly hear V. But I am not a Russian speaker and the Cyrillic alphabet is very different. I can see from experiences transcribing messages from MDZhB transmissions why a western person can misunderstand the pronoucitation of a foreign word or letter. I hear V but if 5 Russians are telling me thats Z, I have to think again about my preconceptions.

Listening to the other few messages available in archives on the internet, they say the station is consistantly UZB and not UVB.

So it seems like UVB is a mistake, our Russian friends certainly seem to think so.

What do you think? Let us know in the forum and the IRC the discussion is ongoing!

Hey guys, SEE! told you I would blog more :P

Ok... so whats been happening today?

well... most of my day has been recoding a piece of jQuery code for the new database, so it will open larger using a lytebox plug in. But as usual with this sort of thing, you fix one thing and it just errors somewhere else... see what we do you you guys! and for free! We should be sainted! but for now, just sticking around and bearing with us until the site is finished will do :P

In other news, the weather here in england is fantastic! im sure its fairly nice in most places right now! So grab your portable RX and lay in the garden with it (what i planed to today until the whole coding problems :P)

Other than that, most work is being done behind the scenes still and hopefuly within a few weeks we should have the site upgraded! :D

Ok guys ill leave it there for today!

Have a good weeks all!

Peace

Hey guys! its been a while since I have done a blog post so bare with me! I will be making a bit more of an effort to blog more now :P

Ok... so the big news this week... WE HAVE A SCHEDULE UP! it may not be perfect, but it will stand in until we get our DataBase finished. This schedule is all the work of one of the guys in the irc called Dominus.

Ok so other things that have been going on...

Well we have noticed G11 missing alot of its scheduled slots this week... is this the end of G11?! I sure hope not! As far as we are aware, G11 is run by Polish intelegence and broadcasts in German (hence the G in G11). Of course this is all speculation as not much of this kind of stuff can be really confirmed.

Another thing we have been doing this week is alot of tiding up of the website from behind the scenes. We have organised all of the current recordings so now it is much easier to find the recording we need etc. There has also been alot of standardisation going on to make everything a little easier to understand.

Of course webweasel has posted about the podcast number 6 being released a few days ago, but I thought its worth a re-mention. This podcast was quite a long one with us going much off topic in many cases, but we got there in the end!

An odd thing we have noticed looking over the ip's of people looking up the website. he have has quite a bit of interest from a few governments... mostly china and the USA. Just thought it was worth a mention :P

Ok guys ill end this blog here before i start to ramble too much. Hope you guys enjoy the site and look out for the up coming Database that will be VERY useful to all you Numberstation listeners out there!

Hey all, hope you shortwave fans are having fun.

First up apologies for not updating the blog posts more often, we didn't even properly announce the release of episode 5 of the podcast. Doh! I intend to blog more often about the site activities and the mysterious world of number stations and a lot has happened over the last month or so. Hopefully we will have a weekly blog post as a minimum.

Mibbit is no longer down, they were under a sustained DDOS attack for a while, so we have a backup channel on starchat.net, #mdzhb. If mibbit is offline your can find us there. We may move providers if it comes to it, but mibbit have been good to us and I don't really want to have to change.

Site updates!

Well there has been plenty going on, more people are signing up and becoming active, the site is growing rapidly with new content. Most of this is of course number station loggings. There have been a few other pages go up, some radio reviews. The site upgrade is on its way, we moved the development arm of the database away from C# to IronPython, but the CMS we are using needs to be ugraded to a more recent version to support IronPython. Strangly enough our backend developer is a linux guy and I am a Microsoft developer, so its been a lot of fun using Mono on linux to develop the system then roll it out to a Windows based .NET host. Once we have the DB up and running and populated the number stations pages will be radiacally different. Everything from database predicted schedules, calendar displays of previous transmission to frequency anaylsis of the letters/numbers used in message groups. We have some great plans, but to be honest with you all, the last 2 weeks in the UK have been like the height of summer, so I have been enjoying the sun instead of upgrading the site like I should. Progress is on a slow burn, but progressing none the less. (Hey you want your podcast right?) Danix has been working very hard on getting the messages pages into one style content making the site much more uniform and easier to read and understand. Thanks for your hard work Danix!

Podcast episode 6

Well as of episode 5 we have started broadcasting the episode live, so you can drop in and listen as we drunkly ramble about things we don't understand. Keep an eye on the twitter feed for the announcements. Hopefully, if we can nail everyone down to doing the same Friday night once a month, we should be able to plan and annouce them in advance. As the live version is gaining in popularity, we might also up our game with a mixing desk so we can play the samples and background music while we are recording, currently the live version is without samples etc and is then mixed down and post-produced before release. The live version is a little less <clean> then the recorded, so do watch out if your easily offended. Also be prepared for it to stop half way through if there is a live number station at that time, as we will stop to rebroadcast it, then carry on afterward. Theres usually more drinking and some guitar playing and other sillyness afterwards. Episode 6 was recorded last friday and as soon as Bowen gets himself in gear, we shall be releasing it. So in the next few days, the weekend at the latest. This episode was better planned and structured, but unfortunatly very drunken so it evened out in the end.

S28/UVB-76/MDZhB

So what should we call our beloved buzzer? That has been a bit of a debate with the team. If we are following Engima 2000's lead, we should call it S28, but everyone on the "interwebz" knows it as UVB-76 and most of the time the station ID's itself as MDZhB so what should we call it? I think the general agreement was to use the offical designator in any official sections (so filenames and recordings) but to keep UVB-76 in use as this is what the world calls the buzzer and exposing the information we gather to the world is the whole point of the site.

UVB-76 has been very busy as always, days of multiple messages, buzzer breakdowns, leaking telephone calls and other oddites. Keep an eye on the S28 2011 page for updates.

Other stations

E06 has been active as always with oddites such as jumping frequency last Sunday morning when it jumped from 6918 to 6925 kHz a few minutes into the transmission, Linas has been following E25 daily and will be uploading the recordings and transcripts soon. G11 has been caught a few times, but we are itching to get the database up and running rather than updating the site through the CMS.

That will do for this post! I promise to make these more regular to keep the site fresh and let you know which station pages to check as well. Check back in a few days for episode 6 of the podcast!

A little history. Danix111 is the person who drove the creation of priyom.org. He started collecting the recordings and transcriptions the group had been gathering and created a study page. At his suggestion we started the UVB-76 and number stations podcast and were rather suprised at the many positive comments. We have sent QSL cards from the podcast all over the world. In late 2010 we contacted Commander Bunny of WBNY a pirate radio broadcaster in the USA. WBNY very kindly rebroadcast the podcast over pirate radio. As the podcast began to grow and more and more people joined our little group of radio listeners, we stepped it up a gear and created Priyom as a place for us to hang out, discuss number stations and help others, who like many of the team have only recently become interested in radio listening.

We were very suprised yesterday evening to find we were featured in the latest episode of The PiratesWeek Podcast. They had found us and thought the podcast was interesting enough to feature in their show and recommend us to their listeners. Thanks a lot guys! We really appreciate the coverage and the compliments.

So that put us to shame a bit, our work on priyom.org had meant that the last episode had lagged, we are now 3 weeks late (sorry!) with episode 5. But we have been working hard on this site, there are only so many hours in a day. Additionally recording a podcast is hard work! Its very mentally exhausting, I am not a natural presenter or speaker for this sort of thing, so it takes a lot of preperation to get it structed and ready for each show, so apologies for my own laziness in not getting a show out for you all.

So this has given me the needed kick to get on and produce episode 5 which we should be recording sometime this week and hopefully will be out this weekend possibly sunday evening. We have not abandoned it and with great feedback from you all and from the PiratesWeek Podcast we need to get on. Thank you so much for your support and special thanks goes to Danix111 for being the core pillar of our community.