Shortwave Graffiti Article in VICE

Apparently, the station got branded with various memes already a month before the war! An article from VICE

BBC Shortwave Service for Ukraine and Russia

BBC to launch shortwave radio service in Ukraine and Russia to ensure access and the "resilience of its news operations." Listeners can tune their receivers to 15735kHz from 18:00-20:00 and 5875kHz from 00:00-02:00, Kyiv time.

Слава Україні! Slava Ukraini!

Temporary Repeater is .. Temporarily Back!

It has been a while and definitely too long! 

When the repeater was started, it was deliberately named "Temporary Internet Repeater", because there was no idea for how long I'd be running it. The site was running self-sufficient for quite many years and then the infrastructure components started to become obsolete one by one. 

The Shoutcast audio delivery servers used for streaming audio, disappeared and Hostgator started to hate me for keeping hundreds of gigabytes of audio archives online. So while my radio setup kept working reliably, the repeater as whole, decomposed.

However, looking at the news and thinking what the UVB-76 really is, it made sense to start doing a little  dusting off and bring the repeater back alive!

Today is just a first step after a relatively long time in hibernation. The archives are still broken, as is literally the whole site. But most important thing, the repeater itself, is now online. As there are literally no audio-only live content delivery servers anywhere, the repeater is back with the video this time. It is a realtime capture of my HDSDR software defined radio screen.

The hardware today is the same faithful Soft66 Lite SDR radio that has been in service all these years, connected to the Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 soundcard and to the laptop from there. Antenna is the same 1m diameter magnetic loop as always.

The video is delivered to the wide world using KeyCDN servers. As this is an affair involving money, the upcoming weeks will tell, if and how its going to look like and how small the video window has to be trimmed to reduce the number of outgoing bytes! :)

Happy Birthday, Repeater!

It just happens so that the UVB-76 Temporary Internet Repeater is today celebrating its 7'th birthday!

The first setup was a Icom IC-R20 handheld scanner streaming with my desktop computer to Bell Online Shoutcast streaming service on the evening of 6'th of June. Little was I to expect that this will be the dawn of a whole new genre of radio hobby with literally thousands of people (re)discovering a mysteries of shortwave thanx to a buzzing sound from Russia!

Thank you for staying interested in unknown! Thank you for your ongoing support and good words! It seems that the longest lasting things in a world are those labeled "temporary"! :)

(Card courtesy of https://www.holidaycardsapp.com/cards/colorful_birthday_cake_card)

Thank You for Helping to Save the Shukhov Tower!

As it appears, the Shukhov radio tower has made it and is now officially preserved as a cultural heritage! 

Russian newspaper Izvestia has reported (August, 18. 2014 already..), that the object "Radio-Tower, 1922, eng. Shukhov, V. G" with registration number 641 has been declared as "cultural heritage of regional importance" and therefore can not be demolished, moved, changed in construction etc. The english news can be read here.

Thank you all for supporting the preservation of one of the legendary landmarks of radio broadcast!

(Picture: http://culture.ru/press-centre/11132)

Quietly Upgrading

Back in 2010 when the UVB-76 Temporary Internet Repeater was set up, the political situation was very different from what it is today. The Buzzer looked like an obscure artifact from cold war past and filled the minds with technology mysticism.

Today, the buzzer seems more .. relevant. We are still not exactly sure of its purpose, but for whatever reasons it got upgraded 4 years ago, it seems to keep doing what its meant for.

And so will be its internet representation, so I am in a process of doing some smaller and larger upgrades to the repeater.

As a first in series, the main signal processing software what captures the signal from radio and processes it to a stream, has been upgraded from relatively old WinradHD to its current offspring HDSDR, version 2.70. The reason was mainly a stability, but as a bonus the 24-hour waterfall has now a nice time scale printed on the left side.