Stories tagged “numbers stations”

  • Shortwave

    …6 9 1 Echo Alpha. 6 9 1 Echo Alpha. 6 9 1 Echo Alpha… There’s an invisible worlds out there beyond the medium-wave. Tune into the shortwave and you can hear everything—ham operators from Zimbabwe, horse race results, intra-agency chann...

  • Resurgence

    The last anyone had ever heard the Poacher was on July 29, 2008. Based out of Cyprus—that was figured out when a few amateur radio operators did some direction finding and triangulated it—it was thought to have been run by the Brits. It wen...

  • The Buzzer

    It was about an hour later when the phone on my desk rang. I was busy telling everybody about the return of the Lincolnshire Poacher, but I stopped my Internet chat session and picked it up. It was Nikolai, calling in from Povarovo, Russia. It was abou...

  • Counting

    My mind was racing. Were the reappearance of the Poacher and the noise behind the Buzzer related? And what were they talking about over in Povarovo, anyway? Bill and Marianna were both on so I discussed it with them for awhile. The Counting StationR...

  • Woodpecker

    I heard a strange warbling sound coming from a rarely-used part of the shortwave spectrum. Intrigued, I took down the time and frequency of the signal, then threw a tape into the cassette deck, recording it. After about ten minutes I figured that the s...

  • 8BY

    We soon had our requisite third participant. Jean-Martin called while I was on the phone with Withers, the annoying call waiting interruption blotting out part of the latter’s sentence. He was speaking in his usual rapid-fire stilted English. The...

  • Directional Instinct

    I grabbed my signal surveyor and dashed outside. It was about four feet tall and constructed out of a wood frame wish some simple radio equipment wired to it. I immediately started scanning. It appeared as if the signal were coming from the east, towar...

  • Phone Messages

    When I got back inside, I saw that there were several messages on my phone. Jean-Martin called back first, asking if I’d had the same east-west frustration that he’d encountered. The next call was my brother, asking if I wanted to go to a r...

  • ENIGMA M10

    Nancy’s phone was encountering superior reception now, and I was able to talk to her in clarity. She reiterated her question: Was the M10 station really transmitting in practical double-time, or was something wrong with her set? I asked her to wa...

  • New Star Broadcasting

    Katsuhara lived on Honshu, the Japanese island. He stumbled onto our little group via a Google search on a Thursday afternoon a couple of months back but had quickly endeared himself to us and become one of our most prodigious contributors. He also spo...

  • Codebreakers

    Nancy asked him how that was possible, since the stations were thought to use codes called “one-time pads”. Essentially, these are code systems that are used once, then discarded, never to be used again. If used properly, they are considere...