UVB-76: The Russian Radio Station That Never Stops Buzzing

2026-07-17 · Signals & Sounds · 8 min read

Turn the dial of a shortwave receiver to 4625 kHz and it is there, as it has been for more than forty years: a short, harsh, rasping buzz, repeating roughly twenty-five times a minute, hour after hour, night after night, without stopping. Radio hobbyists across the planet know it simply as The Buzzer. The monitoring community that catalogues such signals lists it drily as station S28. It has run through the fall of the Soviet Union, through two wars and through several changes of address, and in all those decades no government has ever officially acknowledged that it exists or stated what it is for.

The signal was first noticed on the frequency in the late 1970s, and the earliest confirmed recordings date to 1982. In its early life it transmitted a simpler repeating tone. Around 1990 it settled into the now famous buzz, and the pattern has remained broadly stable ever since.

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