A belated happy New Year and welcome to 2022. It’s not quite a New Year’s resolution, but I want to return to regular blogging here at Radio Survivor, at least covering interesting radio stories of note, along with other radiophonic observations.
With the Super Bowl coming in just under three weeks you can look forward to my (nearly) annual how to listen to the Super Bowl on the radio post. Research has already started, so drop us a line if you know of a source beyond the usual US commercial radio affiliates.
First up is this report from Spin Magazine (it still exists!?) on Ice Radio at McMurdo Station on Antarctica. Conducted over email, writer Lukas Harnisch interviews a group of workers at the scientific outpost who volunteer at the station, broadcasting at 104.5 FM. Longtime readers and listeners will recall that we covered the station on our podcast and radio show back in 2019, talking with McMurdo broadcast engineer Elizabeth Delaquess. Nevertheless it’s nice to see the station get some press. Love this quote from Ralph Maestas, who manages TV and radio operations:
“For the last 10 years we’ve had an essay prompt on the back of the sign-up sheet to volunteer that asks them what they think it means to be a DJ in this community. Almost every response is that they want to give something back to the community.”
Next up, amid concerns that Russia plans to invade Ukraine, one or more radio hackers were reportedly jamming a Soviet-era Russian numbers station, UVB-76, this past weekend. According to Motherboard, the hackers were been broadcasting signals over the station’s frequency that appear as pictures – largely troll-inspired memes – when viewed on a spectrum analyzer.
El denominado "The Buzzer" (UVB-76) un sistema de radiocomunicaciones militares rusas desde hace casi 40 años, lleva días interferido por "piratas". Muchos vinculan esta actividad con el conflicto de Ucrania. La pasada noche se emitieron imágenes muy bizarras en su frecuencia👇👇 pic.twitter.com/5QOMKPtIA1
— David Marugán (@RadioHacking) January 20, 2022
The Motherboard story somewhat inaccurately states that the rogue broadcasters “hijacked” the shortwave station. However, that implies that they’ve taken over the actual broadcast facility or transmitter, either physically or virtually. Instead, what’s happening is that they’re jamming the station by broadcasting over it.
At the moment this seems more of a curiosity than anything else. While numbers stations have long been thought to be transmitting coded messages for international espionage, it’s hard to know if the Russian station in question is still in use by actual spies (if it ever was). Of course, jamming with frequencies that show up as images in the spectrum analyzer is a clever touch, even if it seems like a there’s a pretty limited audience. Thank goodness we have social media, though, else we’d never know about it.
