April 2010 – Page 2 – Engineering Radio

Why “New Media” is no replacement for “Old Media.”

The DC circuit court struck a stinging blow to any thoughts about so-called “Net Neutrality” when it overturned the FCC’s attempts to force Comcast the abide by its rules regarding internet access. The three-judge panel ruled that the FCC does not have the authority to force Internet Service Providers (ISP) to give equal access to all its customers. In a nutshell, this means that companies like Comcast, ATT, and Verizon, can filter search engine results and traffic, baning websites for no specific reasons.

So much for net neutrality. Say I type something here that is critical of one of those companies, or any ISP for that matter. With a few keystrokes, my site will disappear. Gone. Just like that. For those that think the internet is this wonderful open global village thing that can spread the word and as a sort of modern-day check and balance system, think again. In this day and age, when corporations have the same rights as people, look for the large ISPs to spend significant lobbying dollars to keep the laws tilted in their favor. I would expect to also see quite a few campaign contributions to legislators that are friendly to large corporations.

There are several letter-writing campaigns, urging the FCC to change its classification of ISPs to a common carrier status, something that would put the ISPs squarely under the FCC’s control. I look upon those with a jaundiced eye. Perhaps the FCC can be convinced to change the rules, this time. What will happen when a new FCC gets appointed? Will those changes stay in effect? The cynical side of me says no.

Independently run media outlets have traditionally acted as a backstop in our society. There are fewer and fewer of those left these days. I will readily acknowledge that the current crop of radio station owners, with some minor exceptions, have left the industry in shambles. Their decision to place profit above all considerations, in spite of the license being granted in the public trust, has decimated newsrooms, reduced staffing, and relegated community involvement to a minor paperwork shuffle at license renewal time. All of this and more have conspired to make radio dull and uninformative. Bland canned formats created and programmed thousands of miles away have ruined local radio flavor. No wonder why people spend money to download from Itunes.

Yet, radio listenership is still high. Radio’s saving grace is it is nearly universal, everyone has a radio, and most households have four or five radios. The technology is time-tested and it works well. Almost every square mile of the US is covered by broadcast radio signals. Some areas are sparse, but there are at least one or two stations that come in. People are used to radio, there is no learning curve, no subscriber fees, and no censorship from a huge faceless mega-corporation. Well, that last part is in theory, anyway. It is almost too much of a coincidence that mega-corporations also own the majority of radio stations too.

Television as a medium is almost gone. Very few people actually watch over-the-air TV, most people get their TV piped into their house via cable. Once again, as those in the NY metropolitan area know, there is no guarantee that the local cable operator will carry a broadcast station, vis a vis the WABC-7 Cablevision dispute from last month.

Newspapers are struggling to stay afloat, even the once mighty New York Times has seen better days.

That leaves us with Radio to fill in the role of un-censored informer. Can they? Will they? It would be a radical departure from the current course and only time will tell.

The Buzzer

If you have a shortwave radio and are feeling a little bored lately, late (or early depending on your perspective) at night, tune around to 4625 kHz AM. If the propagation is right, you might hear a peculiar buzzing noise. That is a Russian radio broadcast station, call sign UVB-76, it has been nicknamed “The Buzzer.”

This shortwave radio station has been on the air since sometime in early 1982. Its exact purpose is somewhat of a mystery. It transmits a 0.8-second buzzing sound followed by 1 to 1.3 seconds of silence 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The station’s transmitter is located about 25 miles northwest of Moscow (56° 4′ 58″ N, 37° 5′ 22″ E) in an area thought to be near the communication hub of the General Staff of the Russian Army. It transmits with a carrier power of 10KW into a horizontal Dipole antenna about 65 feet high.

There are only 3-4 times during its almost thirty-year history that voices were transmitted on the station. They said (from Wikipedia):

At 21:58 GMT on December 24, 1997, the buzzing abruptly stopped to be replaced by a short series of beeps, and a male voice speaking Russian announced: “Ya — UVB-76. 18008. BROMAL: Boris, Roman, Olga, Mikhail, Anna, Larisa. 742, 799, 14.” The same message was repeated several times before the beep sequence repeated and the buzzer resumed.

A similar voice message was broadcast on September 12, 2002, but with extreme distortion (possibly as a result of the source being too close to the microphone) that rendered comprehension very difficult. This second voice broadcast has been partially translated as “UVB-76, UVB-76. 62691 Izafet 3693 8270.”

A third voice message was broadcast on February 21, 2006 at 7:57 GMT. Again, the speaking voice was highly distorted, but the message’s content translates as: “75-59-75-59. 39-52-53-58. 5-5-2-5. Konstantin-1-9-0-9-0-8-9-8-Tatiana-Oksana-Anna-Elena-Pavel-Schuka. Konstantin 8-4. 9-7-5-5-9-Tatiana. Anna Larisa Uliyana-9-4-1-4-3-4-8.

There seem to be two semi-official explanations; One website claims the station is meant to “Transmit orders to the military units and recruitment centers of the Moscow military district,” and the other is the constant buzzer is the High-frequency Doppler method for ionosphere research. Both of these seem implausible since the station was on the air for fifteen years before any voice transmissions and the station’s location is not near any known research facilities.

Naturally, there is a youtube video of it:

Other possible uses include some type of dead hand system. Is Russian, this is called Perimetr or “Hand from the coffin.” It is an automatic or semi-automatic launching system for nuclear ballistic missiles. In theory, if an incoming first strike is detected, the system is turned on and it waits for input from the military leadership. If none is received, as would be the case if all military and civilian leadership were killed in the first strike (as the so-called “decapitation strike,” or more recently “shock and awe”), then the surviving nuclear weapons would be launched automatically in a retaliatory strike.

Think of something like 4 8 15 16 23 42

Is this the true purpose of The Buzzer? The only ones who really know are the Russians and they, of course, are not saying anything.

If this radio station is used in a system like that, I would imagine that there are radio receivers tuned to 4625 kHz at Russian military installations. That frequency likely propagates well to most of the Russian landmass. In addition to an automated launching system, it might also be used as a “communication of last resort” type system. If the buzzing stops, an alarm sounds, and the speaker un-mutes. This would be a good reason to use AM vice some other type of pulsed or digital modulation scheme, which would likely perform better for an automated system.

If that is the case, then we each should say a little prayer every night that UVB-76 aka “The Buzzer” keeps on buzzing.

I’ll leave you with this one:

I do not speak Russian.

You speak English.

Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself

Delta Current Sample Toroid

Another example from my blown-up shit collection, artifacts division:

Delta TCT-1HV current sample toroid destroyed by lightning

This is a Delta TCT-1HV current sample toroid that was pretty well destroyed during a thunderstorm. I mounted it on a piece of plexiglass because I think it looks cool. This unit was installed at the base of the WGY transmitting tower. One June evening, I received a call from the station operator (back when they had live operators) that the air signal sounded kind of “funny.” So I turned on the radio and sure enough, if one thinks a radio station that sounds like a motorboat is funny, then, why yes indeed, it did sound funny.

Since I only lived a few miles away from the site, I jumped in the trusty truck and headed over. Upon arrival, I found the MW50B on the air at full power, with the carrier power swinging wildly from 20-90 KW with modulation. Hmmmm, bad power supply? Turned the transmitter off and tried to place the backup transmitter on the air. Now the old Gates BC5P had never been super reliable in the first place, but it was odd that it would not even run at all.

Then I had a hunch, let’s walk out to the tower I said to my assistant who had shown up to help. When we got to the ATU building it was filled with blue smoke. Ah ha! Somebody let the magic smoke out of one of the components! I was expecting a capacitor blown in half but was surprised to find the copper tubing that connected the ATU to the tower melted in half. Lightning must have caused an arc between the tubing and the toroid and for some reason, the transmitter kept on running while it was arcing. The copper tubing in the picture with the toroid is only missing about six inches, the way the system was mounted at the tower base, fourteen inches of copper tubing was missing, or rather melted into a puddle on the bottom of the ATU.

I quickly found another piece of 1/2-inch copper, cut it to length, flattened out the ends with a hammer, and drilled mounting holes. Luckily I was able to get everything back in order quickly and the station returned to the air about an hour or so after it went off.

Everything has a cause. Investigation showed that the VSWR circuit on the MW50 had been disconnected from the directional coupler. The lead was un-soldered and taped off, so it was quite intentional. I spoke briefly with two of the three prior engineers that had serviced the MW50 over the years, they both blamed the other one. I surmise this; The WGY tower was prone to lightning strikes because of its height. Even if the tower was not directly struck by lightning, oftentimes the guy wires would arc across the insulators, causing the MW50 to momentarily interrupt the PDM signal and drop the carrier for about a second. Some programming people at the station did not like this, it sounded bad on the air, so one of those guys undid the VSWR circuit, and voila! No more momentary outages during a thunderstorm! Brilliant! Except for the 60-90 minute outage one night…

Sometimes it is better to tell the program directors that their idea is not good, then move on.

STEELYARD Over The Horizon Radar

This does not have much application for broadcast radio, other than the technical facilities are fascinating. I did once hear the slow speed version on 500 KHz distress and calling frequency, which is below the broadcast band. DUGA-3 Over The Horizon Radar (OTH) was a Soviet early warning radar system that operated on HF (between 3-30 MHz). When I was in military communications, stationed on Guam, we were often plagued with the “woodpecker” sound, oftentimes pegging the signal strength meter on whatever frequency we were using. On any typical day, at least once or twice we would have to change frequencies due to the “RAT TATATATATATATATATATATATATAT!” coming in over the top of what we were trying to do. Anyone who listened to shortwave radio or was a ham radio operator from the mid 70’s on through 1989 will be familiar with the sound.

The NATO classification for the system was STEELYARD. I don’t know if it is a coincidence or not, but the name fits the system design. There were three systems, one located near Chornobyl, inside the evacuation zone, which was abandoned intact. The second was near in Ukraine, outside of the Chornobyl exclusion zone, and the third was on the Russian Pacific coast, near the island of Sakhalin.

Basically, it operated in the HF frequency range, 3-30 MHz with a power of about 10 million watts (some sources up to 40 MW). The propagation conditions were continuously monitored with an ionospheric chirp sounder (the civilian version looks something like this). The best frequency for the target area was then chosen and used without regard to band plans or frequency planning. In fact, often the Soviet shortwave propaganda station Radio Moscow was also interfered with. The target areas were the missile launching and testing areas used by the US and Great Britain. The object resolution was about 15 km, which is not that good, but good enough to determine the origin and flight path of a potential missile.

Distant view STEELYARD OTHR array, Chernobyl, Ukraine

The remains of the DUGA-3 array near Chornobyl represent some real engineering feats. First off, the tall towers are 146 meters (479 feet tall), the short towers are 90 meters tall (295 feet) and the system is aligned in a row 750 meters (2,460 feet long). The taller towers are for lower frequencies because they have larger transmit antenna elements, thus the shorter towers are for higher frequencies.

Side view STEELYARD OTHR, Chernobyl, Ukraine

The array itself is quite an impressive close-up. The cage like devices are the radiating elements of the antenna. The elements are feed by open wire feed line from the bottom of the tower. Behind the radiating elements, you can see a series of wires, these acted as a reflector, directing the energy transmitted out the front of the array.

Considering the wind load, these are substantial towers. I would say the wind load on the face of the tower would be almost equivalent to flat plate. The towers are strongly back-braced.

The ionospheric chirp sounder receive antenna is also located at a site known as “The Circle.” An ionospheric chirp sounder sweeps the HF spectrum from one location and is received in a second location. This gives real-time radio propagation information. The Circle is about ten miles away from the STEELYARD array.

Ionospheric chirp sounder antenna, Ukraine

The other DUGA-3 radar stations were scraped after the system was turned off in 1989, this one was abandoned intact. Over the years looters have made off with most of the transmitter and receiver apparatus, wiring and associated scrap metal. Only the towers remain and empty buildings remain.

Pictures from Lost Places, more pictures and information there.