Radio and the Internet are not incompatible.
In the era of information explosion brought about by the Internet, radio broadcasting has become a rather distant term. However, the medium still has a fairly loyal fan, and they are radio amateurs, or Ham for short.
Ham uses radio stations to connect with other Hams, exchange information, explore technologies, and listen to information from official or unofficial radio stations. At the same time, Ham is by no means an out-of-date geek, they can use internet media and social media normally, and the younger generation of them is also happy to accept the current pop culture.
Since January, a group of people and unknown sources of Ham have hijacked the band of a Russian military radio station, playing pop music, melodies, ACG songs, and even Zhao Benshan's sketches.
Peers faithfully reflected the performances of these hijackers on the Internet, which was actively spread by netizens at home and abroad, and also made this military radio station, which originally only lived in conspiracy theories, get unprecedented attention.
1
This mysterious Russian military radio station is commonly referred to as "UVB-76". "UVB-76" is a shortwave radio station with a frequency of 4625 kHz (kHz) and is said to have been listened to for the first time since 1982. Before 1990, the "UVB-76" broadcast a high-pitched beep 24 hours a day at a frequency of about 25 tones per minute.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the "UVB-76" was incorporated into Russia, and the content of the broadcast was changed to beep. Over the next three decades, the beeps underwent some minor changes, such as longer duration and deeper pitch, but remained largely unchanged. So The Hams nicknamed the station "The Buzzer."
There are several military radio stations that occupy a certain frequency band to emit noise, but only "UVB-76" is the most famous, probably for the following two reasons.
The first reason is that the "UVB-76" has been too active since the Cold War broadcast, making people speculate about its use.
The station doesn't always broadcast beeps tirelessly, and sometimes there are live broadcasts. On Christmas Eve 1997, Ham, who was listening to the UVB-76, heard the radio's vocals for the first time:
“Ya UVB-76, Ya UVB-76. 180 08 B R O M A L 74 27 99 14. Boris, Roman, Olga, Mikhail, Anna, Larisa. 7 4 2 7 9 9 1 4.”
According to international rules, the "UVB-76" at the beginning is the radio station self-reporting door. According to the Priyom.org of the shortwave radio research website, "UVB-76", which was supposed to be written as "UZB-76", was a fallacy caused by the forced transliteration of the Russian alphabet into English, which has been spread to this day.
In order to avoid confusion caused by vague pronunciation and too much noise when broadcasting a single letter, radiocommunication is accustomed to using specific words to refer to letters, some words in English, and personal names in Russian. Thus, the six Russian names on the radio repeat the preceding "BROMAL".
A list of names for some Russian letters
Some Russian veterans point out that the word in the broadcast is an order, and over time, the meaning of the word refers to the order also changes, such as "BROMAL" may refer to entering a state of full combat readiness or full withdrawal. Of course, no one knows what this "BROMAL" should mean.
Russian officials have never confirmed the radio's true use. The current mainstream view is that "UVB-76" is a communications broadcast serving the military regions of western Russia, broadcasting in letters and numbers information that only those who have a codebook understand. As for the beep that occupies the frequency band, it is preventing others from using the same frequency.
A small frame of paper from a Russian military recruitment office with a frequency of "UVB-76" written at 4625kHz
Other conjectures can only be attributed to unfounded conspiracy theories. The most alarmist claim is that the "UVB-76" is part of the Soviet nuclear weapons control system "Death Hand", which is still in force, and once Russian territory is hit by a nuclear bomb, the "Dead Hand" system can not receive a continuous buzz signal, and will automatically trigger a nuclear counterattack.
As of March 2021, Russia has a total of 1,456 nuclear warheads
From June to September 2010, the beep of "UVB-76" stopped several times, and there were occasional knocks on the door and the sound of flipping books, and netizens who believed conspiracy theories nervously thought that the end of the world was coming, but nothing happened. Since then, the "UVB-76" will also stop broadcasting beeps from time to time, and the "dead hand" conspiracy theory is obviously self-defeating.
The spectrum is lifeless, indicating that the "UVB-76" is in a state of silence
The Hams identified that the "UVB-76" had been relocated because of the russian force establishment, and the broadcasting had stopped for a period of time. The former site of Povarovo, near Moscow, has been used as an adventure destination by part of Ham, and remnants of equipment and a yellowed operating log found in the abandoned facility further hammered out the claim that UVB-76 was a military communications station.
Abandoned bunkers
Run logs
2
The second reason why the "UVB-76" has attracted attention is that the station is frequently disturbed by external factors and has a long tradition of "whole life".
"UVB-76" is a short-wave band radio. Short waves can be reflected or refracted by the ionosphere in the atmosphere, and after being shot into the sky at an angle, they can be reflected back to Earth far beyond the horizon. Based on this feature, shortwave radio was often used for long-distance communications and was widely used by the military and civilian undertakings during the Cold War period before the spread of satellite broadcasting, cable broadcasting and the Internet.
Shortwave transmission also has certain disadvantages. Shortwaves are not stable and are susceptible to interference, including natural factors such as seasons, climate, time, sunspots, and some human factors. It is precisely because of this shortcoming that the argument that the "UVB-76" is a stable signal transmitter of the "dead hand system" is simply untenable.
"Shortwave" is also known as "Skywave"
Also in June 2010, an Estonian entrepreneur and Ham set up a repeater on his own, created a UVB-76.net website, and opened up the channel for the first time to listen to "UVB-76" from the Internet, driving the station's popularity around the world. The site has been visited by hundreds of thousands of people, and there have been many accounts of UVB-76 anomalies or external disturbances.
The principle of jamming radio is much simpler than writing hacking code, all that is needed is a more powerful transmitter. This form of interference is commonly known as "gaitai", the jammer will adjust the device to the frequency band that wants to interfere, broadcast a radio stronger than the original radio signal at a super power, cover the signal of the original radio, and give people the illusion that the original radio station is broadcasting other content.
In September 2010, "UVB-76" was heard playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Swan Lake had serious political implications in the Soviet Union and Russia, and once Swan Lake was broadcast on television, it meant that something big politically had happened— such as the death of an important national figure.
When Swan Lake was broadcast, the background beep was still broadcast normally. Ham speculated that perhaps the increased popularity of "UVB-76" led to a good Ham interfering with the radio, playing "Swan Lake" to ridicule Putin.
After the Crimean War in 2014, the "UVB-76" suffered many interferences, and the interference source played Slavic music and air raid sirens, and the sound was very small, mixed with beeps, and it could not achieve the effect of "gaitai". Until 2021, the frequency of interference of "UVB-76" has increased, and the music played has become much clearer from "total loss sound quality".
"The song 'UVB-76' is still better than most radio stations today"
Today, most of the audience of "UVB-76" no longer relies on expensive physical devices and prefers to use the Internet's real-time broadcast sites. These sites connect large radio receivers around the world and convert radio waves into visual spectral waterfalls in real time.
This is also taken advantage of by the disruptors. They paint directly on the pulsating color spectrum, adding a layer of visual experience to the auditory experience established by radio waves.
On August 9, 2021, the jammer plotted Mickey Mouse with a spectrum map, Youtube@On shortwave
The specific source of these disturbances is difficult to verify, but there are indications that Ukrainians are quite active in this regard.
Russia and Ukraine have been unable to deal with each other, and the contradictions between the two countries have been heating up, and they have become international current affairs hotspots since 2022. Although the Ukrainian authorities did not make a big fuss, the civilian Ham seemed to regard the invasion of Russian military radio as a daily pastime, and they had sufficient motivation and sufficient ability.
According to Russian media TJournal, on Christmas Eve 2017, a group of disruptors played Russian rap in the band of "UVB-76" and shouted "Glory to Ukraine". On August 13, 2021, the "UVB-76" was interfered with by music and spectrograms, and among the multiple spectrograms released by the interlocutors, there was a national emblem of Ukraine.
Source B @ Prischna _Perisoreus
The new Ham who will turn "UVB-76" into a song platform in 2022 is also Ukrainian and wants to express some political demands. However, unlike their predecessors, they are all senior ACG enthusiasts, and the whole work is also extraordinary.
3
On January 7, 2022, a netizen on the "UVB-76" Discord discussion channel overheard someone blowing on a microphone on the radio. This sound was recognized by hams as a precursor to the invasion, and since then, the 4625kHz band has been occupied for hours on an almost daily basis by endless music and spectrograms.
A user on Discord, Игорь _DA, admitted responsibility for the hijacking, claiming he had a team of four and also publicly showed off his radio equipment. In the follow-up broadcast, they called themselves "ABOBA" or "ABOBUS", and also advertised the self-built groups of Discord and Telegram chat software, allowing netizens to watch lively and not too big to order songs.
The disruptors have sent out several politically charged spectrograms, such as peace symbols and radiation markers, guy Fox's mask in "V-Kills", and naturally Ukraine's national emblem.
But the content is certainly less influential than memes and memes, such as the avatar, PornHub and Playboy trademarks, the crew image in Among Us, and a string of plain text with the Russian-language curse Cyka Blyat.
Probably due to the deterioration of the situation in Eastern Europe, on January 19, the military imitated the previous code language form, using "UVB-76" to broadcast at least 23 messages, which not only attracted more curious outside the circle listeners, but also confused the military broadcast and interference broadcasting, many netizens once felt that the source of interference in playing music was the military's code.
On January 20, while a group of netizens continued to monitor the situation of "UVB-76", ABOBA hit the iron while it was hot, exposing its musical taste to the whole world. On this day, their song list has a background music of the mobile game "Maiden Frontline", and the relevant fragments have been recorded by the Chinese and uploaded to the B station, which has achieved a fairly good playback.
So far, the "UVB-76" has been fired out of the circle at home and abroad. After the broadcast url was spread, the monitoring of "UVB-76" was no longer the patent of a few Ham, recording interference broadcasts, recording daily program lists, and checking the "two-dimensional concentration" of ABOBA members, gradually becoming a new form of carnival in the corner of the Internet.
The recorded footage shows that there must be "Oriental Crowds" in the ABOBA team, that is, fans of the "Oriental Project" series. The well-known "Bad Apple" is broadcast almost every day, and the oriental fandoms such as "Qiluno's Perfect Arithmetic Classroom" that are well known in the circle are also super high, and ABOBA receives all the orders.
Rick Aisley's Never Gonna Give You Up is a regular on UVB-76. This enduring hit song is now also played every two or three days, and ABOBA is happy to play it, as are listeners who "voluntarily" cheated.
Since ABOBA invaded military radio, they did not forget to do things in the context of the international situation and geopolitics. One second they were still playing the Korean song "Gangnam Style", which had been slaughtered in previous years, and the next second they were going to cut the song, to the North Korean "pop music" "Attack War", and it was hard not to think that they were deliberate.
In addition to the spectrogram, they also used SSTV (Slow Scan Television) technology for the first time during interference to transmit quadratic images. SSTV is a short-wave radio-based image transmission method that is capable of transmitting some monochrome or color low-pixel pictures at a slow speed. Although only Ham knows how to receive these pictures, forwarding pictures is just a matter of ordinary people doing it.
The source of the image Youtube@JuEdWa
Successive days of high-intensity broadcasts brought popularity to ABOBA and burdened their equipment. On January 24, they stopped broadcasting, explaining on Discord that the amplifier tube was burning and that the new fittings would not arrive until two to three weeks later.
However, since January 28, a few days near the Spring Festival, the "UVB-76" has been disturbed again. Most of the programs in these days are Chinese content, from "Welcome to Beijing" to "Pinch Your Crotch", to Zhao Benshan's sketch "Heart Disease", CCTV Spring Festival Gala reserved track "Unforgettable Tonight", from beginning to end, it is like the whole life of the Chinese people.
According to the report of Station B Ham@ Feng Hua, this interference was also a "gang crime", one of the members was an overseas Chinese from Southeast Asia, and the team's interference launch station was located in Western Europe. Similar to the situation at ABOBA, they also ran into a damaged device, contributed a few wonderful broadcasts and disappeared.
Source B station @ years fenghua
On February 5, ABOBA repaired the equipment and continued to monopolize the interference broadcasting business of the "UVB-76". They set up a special Twitter account to publish the program list before each broadcast, and also left a cryptocurrency tip link, posing a posture to normalize the interference broadcast.
4
As most people reasonably suspect, the above-mentioned "whole life" of interfering with the radio may be illegal and not worth advocating.
Amateurs in other industries can claim their titles, but Ham has to go through government formalities to obtain a license to become a full Ham, and is subject to various laws and regulations thereafter. The frequency used by "UVB-76" is definitely not an amateur band that can be broadcast casually, and it is speculated that the interference is located in a relatively loose control of the radio, otherwise they would most likely have been invited to tea by the relevant departments.
But these Ham's efforts also have positive implications. The noisy broadcast from 4625kHz, a mixture of continuous beeps, poor sound pop, and background noise, creates a new style and a wonderful atmosphere.
Although the "dead hand" conspiracy theory has long been falsified, immersion in such broadcasts for a long time will inevitably cause some imaginative listeners to fall into some kind of dream that nuclear war has already occurred: the world has been destroyed, and "UVB-76" has become the only remaining radio broadcast on the nuclear wasteland, broadcasting the "precious legacy" of mankind on the Internet before the outbreak of nuclear war.
Since the Russian military has never done anything against those who interfere with the radio, we may as well think differently: these Ham's non-stop interference with the "UVB-76" may be the real "dead hand system" - as long as anyone dares to continue to interfere with the military radio, it is enough to prove that the most terrible war has not yet arrived.