Giftshop is Now Open!

As of the result of random conversation on IRC "I wan to buy something UVB-76 labeled for Christmas!", uvb-76.net now has a Giftshop! :)) Please check the link on top of the blog page!

Archive Engine and 24h Waterfall Now Works!

Finally, after almost a month, the archiving system is working as it's supposed to! Blessed be anybody who have anything to do with developing CURL, especially Günter Knauf for maintaining it for Win32!
Thanx to that, the latest archive on the list is actually almost real-time snapshot, lagging less than a minute behind the actual stream, as its getting updated every 30 seconds.

Other improvement is the WinradHD 24h waterfall capture: it is now uploaded every 15 minutes, so if you want to check if the buzzer has been active, just look at the waterfall and you will see how it looks from the streamer perspective!

Both buttons are at the top of the screen, just below the UVB-76 banner, if you haven't noticed yet! :)

Why had the buzzer go to maintenance .. ?

As some of you may have already noticed, there are some archives published at the page what you get when pressing the 'test' tab on top of this page.

The reason I havent announced it yet is, that having just 200Mb audio files downloadable is sort of semi-useful solution, so I have been wrestling around to get them visualized somehow and link that to online player of a sort.

If one thinks the utilities for performing FFT (fast fourier transformation) analysis on 1Gb+ audio files (as some of the UVB-76 Repeater archives are) are readily available from the internet, one has to reconsider .. and write such utilities from scratch! :)

And so I did. Only to realize, 10 minutes ago, that I should have had done something like that already ages ago!

The first decent output generated by my new tool (call it a MP3toJPG or whatever :)) was so revealing, that I thought I will share it!

The picture below is a spectral analysis of the archive from August 28, 2010 and displays about 80 hours worth of audio (MP3 file size was 850Mb):

(Click on image to view/download)

The timeline goes from left to right and the frequency goes from bottom to top, i.e. lower frequency is at the bottom of the image and higher frequency (4000Hz) is at the top. The file is over 7000 pixels wide, so beware! :)

The bright markers are where the UVB-76 buzzer is transmitting, although you will se about every 10'th or so buzz there (the total "length" of this picture is 80 hours, remember).

However, what you clearly see is that the buzzer what is supposed to be transmitting more or less consistent signal, is drifting up and down in frequency as it pleases!

Its not the analysis software, as you can see sometimes a morse signal kicking in and having no deviation whatsoever.

Two possibilities - either the buzzer was meant to move around like that because of the desired functionality of the signal, or the equipment neded some serious maintenance. Considering that the signal disappeared shortly after for several weeks, I would assume the latter ...

IRC Channel Change

There has been a lack of operators for some time now at the #UVB76 channel, mainly for the reason that channel owner (not me) has completely disappeared form the scene two months ago. While I sincerely hope everything is well with him, the IRC client links are now pointing to the new channel #UVB-76, so please update your records if you are using other IRC clients than Mibbit.

I have also promoted few regular users to AOP status, so hopefully they are able to regain control quickly if things get out of hands!