Add Burst Buddy to your home screen for quick access
NFHCBurst Buddy
SNN's Hidden Channel Decoder
What is Burst Buddy?
Burst Buddy is the audience-facing entry point to NFHC — the hidden machine-readable signal SkyNet News Network embeds in every broadcast. It's where someone who heard an SNN show on a phone, a laptop, or in the open air goes when they realize something is encoded in the audio.
It's the live proof-of-concept that the NFHC spec actually works on commodity devices — no special app, no network, just sound moving through the room — and it's the reading destination once you're inside. The full transcript of every broadcast lives here, paired with each show's secret After Hours backstage chapter.
From here you can step outward into the rest of the SkyNet ecosystem — the live Skylab Studio, the audio archive, the Equipment Room of related tech, the callsign signup that unlocks the Secret Story Vault — but Burst Buddy itself is something distinct. The Studio has the live scene. The archive has the audio. Burst Buddy has the words they said and what they did — the single richest representation of the cast's 100+ broadcast arc anywhere on the project.
Tap LISTEN, press play on any SNN broadcast nearby, and find out for yourself.
Point your phone at an SNN broadcast playing nearby. Burst Buddy will detect the hidden NFHC burst automatically.
MANUAL ACOUSTIC COUPLERSKYLAB ANALOG BACKUP
⊙
⊙
BELL 202 // FSK BACKUP
AWAITING TAPE...
Hold on — tap LISTEN first
The hidden NFHC burst fires in the first few seconds of every broadcast. Burst Buddy has to be actively listening before the show starts — otherwise the chapter stays locked and you'll just hear a normal news segment.
Already heard a broadcast on this device today? The reminder won't show up again this session.
Manual Acoustic Coupler
Before networks, the way to send digital data between far-apart computers was through phone lines. You'd cradle a phone handset into two rubber cups — one against the earpiece, one against the mouthpiece — and your bytes traveled as audible tones from one machine to another.
Burst Buddy's Skylab tape deck is the same idea, in reverse. The broadcast plays through any speaker nearby — phone, laptop, radio, room — you hold your phone close to it, the deck records a tight 10-second window, and the hidden NFHC signal gets decoded from the captured audio.
The signal uses Bell 202 FSK — two-tone frequency shift keying, 1200 Hz and 2200 Hz. The same modulation that ran early modems. Tough as nails. No network, no special app, just sound moving through the air.
The streaming LISTEN path is faster when it locks. The coupler is the fallback the protocol was designed around — record-then-decode always wins on noisy rooms, weak speakers, and stubborn signal.
◆ Transcript Archive ◆
Read what the crew said — every original broadcast, complete with a secret After Hours embedded backstage chapter.
After Hours is the backstage continuation — meant to be enjoyed
after the broadcast you're playing now has finished.
🔒 Chapter unlocked. We'll open it when this broadcast finishes — or tap here to read it now.
Secret Story Vault — Register Your Callsign
A registered SNN Asset callsign unlocks the Secret Story Vault when audio conditions aren't conducive to a clean burst decode. The audio path remains the real one — this is the side door.
Anonymous use is fine — you just don't get Vault access if audio fails to decode.
One callsign works across Equipment Room, Studio, and Burst Buddy.
◆ INACCURATE BLURB
We didn’t say what the archive note says we said.
The summary system that writes the notes on each of our broadcasts got this one wrong. We’re not rewriting the note — that would be tidier than the show actually is. We’re stamping it, owning it, and we’ll tell you what we actually did on air. The seams are the show.