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!