Vega: a daytime voice channel from Rostov-on-Don on 5372 kHz

What you hear

By day, on 5372 kHz, a voice channel of the Russian military net that the markers belong to. There is no buzz of its own: between transmissions the frequency is empty, or nearly so, because the Pip, which lives only 76 kHz up the dial on 5448 kHz and not far away on the ground, can often be heard faintly behind. When Vega transmits, a voice reads messages that are longer and more elaborate than the usual callsign and figure groups: strings of code words, which listeners describe as the Monolith and Uzor formats after words that recur in them. Now and then the voice gives way to a plain, steady tone at about 800 Hz, held for a while, whose purpose is not explained.

The catalogue name carries the letter group НЬЖЙ, a callsign that listeners associate with the station, and Vega is the name it is logged under.

Who transmits and why

The transmitter is in Rostov-on-Don, which places the station firmly in the Southern Military District's net, alongside the Pip and the Squeaky Wheel. The reason listeners pay attention to it is practical rather than romantic. The same message often goes out over several channels at once, and Vega is one of the places where the full text of a message can be heard in a form that is easier to follow than a marker's brief interruption. Matching what is heard here against the Pip or the Buzzer is how the structure of the net has been pieced together: which channels carry the same traffic, in which order, and how the code words are used.

What the messages mean is not known, and nobody in a position to know has said. The net is assumed to be military from everything about it. The 800 Hz tone may be a line test, a marker of sorts or something else entirely; that is a guess and should be read as one.

The channel is sent openly, in the clear, and listening is only receiving.

When and where to listen

Vega is a daytime channel only. It uses 5372 kHz and, unlike its neighbours, has no known night frequency, so the time to listen is the hours of daylight in Rostov, which for most of Europe means the working day. 5372 kHz behaves like the 60 metre range: a few hundred kilometres of reliable coverage by day, more in winter when the band is quieter. The best receivers are in south-eastern and eastern Europe, Turkey and the Caucasus; from central Europe the signal is usually readable when conditions are normal, from Britain and Scandinavia it is weak.

Because the Pip is only 76 kHz away on the dial, the two can be checked with one receiver: if the Pip is loud, Vega, when it transmits, will be too. The waterfall shows a voice transmission as a sudden wide block; the 800 Hz tone shows as a single clean line. USB is the right mode; if the voice is off-pitch try AM.

In ShackDeck

Station catalogue → Mystery stations → Vega. The program picks a public receiver that covers 5372 kHz, tunes it and sets USB; no receiver, antenna or account of your own is needed. The Pip's dotted stripe nearby on the waterfall is a handy sign that the receiver hears the Rostov transmitters well.