Scroll down to "Doppler Radio Sounding of the Ionosphere", note the broadcast frequency.
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.
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.
People have recorded numbers stations in the past: http://www.archive.org/details/ird059. These CDs, a collection of number station recordings, were released in 1997. Not sure if anyone has been recording since then. Listening to some of the samples is fascinating.
I was exposed to these before the Wilco album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" (which uses number station samples). It was fun to have my mind blown by the album and then explain to my friend (who introduced me to the album) about number stations.
probably unrelated, but on Tuesday I saw a music video on TV. What do the two have in common? Well, they're both fairly regular occurrances that are usually not note-worthy.
Unless of course, you are an ardent devotee of Dimitri Soudas' propaganda.
http://elpub.wdcb.ru/journals/rjes/v10/2007ES000227/2.shtml
Scroll down to "Doppler Radio Sounding of the Ionosphere", note the broadcast frequency.
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.