Shortwave Radio "Number Stations"

[Wildkat]

In one of those "The internet sucked me in" moments tonight, I have been reading and downloading like crazy stuff about these. I can recall playing with shortwave radios as a kid and picking these up and wondering what the heck they were...

Essentualy, what they are, are stations broadcasting from unknown origin, seemingly random number or phoentic alphabet letters, often accompanied by random weird tone busts or other noise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station

One sample I find super-creepy

Some say its used by governments to contact remote agents, others say its used by various groups doing not-so-legal things. It seems odd, that with the Internet so prolific that this type of communication seems totaly primitive, but it still goes on today....

A 4cd set of recordings complied over the years was released a while back, and its on the net in MP3 form here. Go and listen to a few, I find it fascinating and yet kind of spooky, the electronic voices used give it a totaly non-human feel to it. Almost like the people the system is for have been dead for years and the some old hardware from the 70's is still functioning by itself somewhere, in a long ago forgotten safehouse...

[Schlep]

The swedish rhapsody one is very creepy.

I remember hearing something like this interfering with AM (I think) in South Dakota when I was growing up years ago. Creeped me out.

[mollipen]

I've always had a spot in my heart for these things. Logically, of course there is some perfectly rational reason for these things - government use, drug runners, etc. like you mentioned. But a part of you wants to believe that they are some strange, etherial broadcast that if you could just decipher it, it would lead to something unbelievable.

Like you said about the broadcast going on after the people are long dead. That was one of my favorite parts of Lost - where they picked up the transmittion that then ended up having been running for years. If you allow yourself for a second to forget the fact that that probably isn't the case, there's a creepy yet intriguing fantasy to it all.

[kedawa]

It's all those bomb-shelter crazies from the cold war, trapped in their bunkers, trying to communicate with the outside world, except only their transmitters work.

Actually, I used to listen to shortwave radio as a kid, and most of it was either time signals, weather reports, or some kind of nautical communication.

A lot of old ships still use it, since sound codes work better than voice when you have a crappy signal, and shortwave has such long range.

[Grey's Anatomy]

That was mildly frightening, yet enthralling.
I think I'll have to DL a lot of it as well.

[Revoltor]

Wow. Thanks for this. I'm tempted to buy the 4-CD set mentioned in this NPR broadcast: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=4167689

EDIT: Nevermind, it looks like most, if not all, are on the archive.org page:
http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-d...ctionid=ird059

EDIT2: wow, I totally missed the link to it in the original post. I pretty much read the first bit, saw the link and never looked back. Thanks anyway.

[animegirl]

These are really creepy and I went through the phase of looking up tons of info about them. It's kinda late, is the Swedish one the one with the little girl? It is by far the scariest one, she sounds like she HAS NO SOUL.

[sphere79]

I remember (author, intelligence expert) Robert Steele talking about these at the last Hackers on Planet Earth conference in NYC. He actually identified who was communicating with who in a few of them and gave some meanings for the tones / music / numbers.

[Rhydant]

This is some weird shit. And now I am terribly interested.

[Revoltor]

I remember (author, intelligence expert) Robert Steele talking about these at the last Hackers on Planet Earth conference in NYC. He actually identified who was communicating with who in a few of them and gave some meanings for the tones / music / numbers.

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