Saturday, December 15, 2012

UVB-76 "The Buzzer" Story and Live Feed

Now-abandoned former transmitting site



or


Now it's time to gather around for a truly bizarre story.

There's a radio station at 4625 kHz for shortwave from Russia that has been broadcasting roughly the same monotonous buzzing signal since 1982: it's called "The Buzzer" and seems to be surrounded by bizarre theories as to its nature and, more recently, where it's coming from.

In addition to the 21 tone-per-minute background buzzing, morse code is often heard on this station- on rarer occasions there have been various voices, tests, and other noise heard from the station. (I was tuning in before writing this and heard some morse code myself being broadcast.) Sometimes the tone changes pitch slightly, slows down, or speeds up, seemingly without a purpose.

Theories of its purpose range from ionosphere observation, to military broadcast, to some sort of coded spy radio site, to a monitoring site for satellite feeds, to some sort of bizarre fusion of a transmitter and phone lines- however nobody seems to know for sure. Some phone conversations have been recorded as well from this broadcast- but the buzzing goes on 24 hours a day.

For those who wish to read more about this site you can read the Wikipedia article here and there is one very good blog with several live stream links here.

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