Whilst the meaning/intention of the voice messages may be "mysterious", the general purpose of the signal is not - it's for ionosphere research:<p><a href="http://elpub.wdcb.ru/journals/rjes/v10/2007ES000227/2.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://elpub.wdcb.ru/journals/rjes/v10/2007ES000227/2.shtml</a><p>Scroll down to "Doppler Radio Sounding of the Ionosphere", note the broadcast frequency.<p>My guess is that the occasional voices are either a) someone else randomly broadcasting on the same frequency, b) some technical hitch at the broadcast station. Whatever the reason, 99.9999% it's going to be totally mundane.
The idea that the numbers are simple lat/lon coordinates (referring to a point in the Barents Sea) seems plausible ... although why the Russians would be transmitting something that openly and obviously is a little weird. Doubtless they have more secure communication channels for their Navy.<p>It's a bit surprising to me that nobody has been recording and archiving the station's transmissions until recently (besides, presumably, other nations' intelligence services); it's relatively simple compared to a lot of other projects, and obviously 'numbers stations' are something that fascinate a lot of geeks and radio enthusiasts.
On an entirely unrelated note, a suspected british spy was killed this week.<p><a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2010/08/20108258200315313.html" rel="nofollow">http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2010/08/20108258200...</a>
Probably unrelated, but on Tuesday:
Two CF-18s shadowed a pair of Russian military aircraft Tuesday as they flew within 56 kilometres of Canadian soil<p>From: <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/08/25/cf-18s-russians-airspace.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/08/25/cf-18s-russians-...</a>