Yeah I was excited when I saw preview but the movie was not good. Too bad it's such an interesting subject. Maybe the new x files will do an episode on them....http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Numbers_Station
I caught this by chance on television. It isn't really about numbers stations, but as a backdrop they kind of work
Hey, I was a technohippy once!Time to admit my 11 year technohippy period, with no haircuts and no shaving.
From 1991 to 2002 in Oz I wrote a column called Shortwave With a Difference for two radio magazines. I stayed up most nights until almost dawn monitoring the radio waves from DC to daylight, recording military, space, pirate and intelligence radio transmissions and reporting on them and ID'ing them for the magazines. I doubt if this would be legal in the UK, but it was in Oz.
LOL. My reaction to coming out of the military - not gonna have a haircut, not gonna have a shave, not taking orders from anyone else, gonna work for myself.Hey, I was a technohippy once!
Time to admit my 11 year technohippy period, with no haircuts and no shaving.
https://soundcloud.com/doc227/cherryripe
[URL='https://soundcloud.com/doc227/cherryripe2[/QUOTE']https://soundcloud.com/doc227/cherryripe2[/QUOTE[/URL]]
The Lincolnshire Poacher Numbers station
https://soundcloud.com/doc227/lincoln2
This is a paper about the spies' use of the numbers station specifically and what led them to being caught.
http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/papers/cuban_agent_communications.pdf
It's amazing what you can pickup especially with shortwave, having the skip and such.Here's a different kind, a USAF "SKYKING" broadcast sent "in the blind" to airborne bombers.
https://soundcloud.com/doc227/skyking
It's amazing what you can pickup especially with shortwave, having the skip and such.
Really? There's a constantly (well, you know what I mean) airborne nuclear deterrent force, to complement the submarines? Every day's a school day.And these things are in the air, 24/7/365.
Really? There's a constantly (well, you know what I mean) airborne nuclear deterrent force, to complement the submarines? Every day's a school day.
In a similar vein, I was recently reading about Russian plans to re-introduce train-launched missiles. It sounds barmy at first glance, but how do you track half a dozen or so disguised trains among the hundreds of daily movements on thousands of kilometres of track?
They have intelligent trains. Scary.At this rate it will turn out Sodor is a nuclear power, too.
LOL .. One big flash and we're all ash ...Looks like China is at it as well. At this rate it will turn out Sodor is a nuclear power, too.
in his best Ringo Starr voice:Looks like China is at it as well. At this rate it will turn out Sodor is a nuclear power, too.
I saw the Numbers Stations film in Poundland so I thought I'd give it a punt. For what it was - A riff on Assault on Precinct 13 - I thought it was pretty acceptable. But it would be interesting to see a film that focused on the numbers.Yeah I was excited when I saw preview but the movie was not good. Too bad it's such an interesting subject.
The technologies of earlier eras was, as you rightly surmise, still capable of limited storage/retrieval of audio (your chosen example of the Speaking Clock is perfect).
Here's a picture of a multi-platter glass disk audio player, variations of which were used since the 1940s into the 1960s/70s age of proto-digital systems.
See http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/calling-time-a-history-of-the-speaking-clock-683753
Consider technologies as old as "talkies" (ie optically-recorded cinematic movie sound) run as multitrack players. Or, alternatively, magnetic recording solutions using multiple wire-loop players (so, an approach often used in pre-digital days for telemetry data recording, where flat traditional recording tape is substituted with a continuous band of wire, or metal tape). This almost bullet-proof solution was used in early aviation 'black box' cockpit voice recorders.
Whilst these solutions were absolutely not 'solid state' (by self-evident virtue of multiple moving parts), people in the modern day can understandably be surprised by the ingenious capabilities of pre-digital designs. The existence of analogue computers and multipath electromechanical sequence switching systems even during WW2 can be a revelation for many people today. The absence of silicon age semiconductors in the pre-transistor 'thermionic age' (ie valve/tube solutions) meant for limited storage capacities and switching speeds...but there were options to design and build right the way up to the boundaries set by the solutions available within any given era.
Whilst direct real-time synthesis of speech was impractical in the 40s-70s, analogue segmented speech recording and playback was most-assuredly an achievable outcome.
Also: we in the modern day have become blinded by the democratisation of technology.
Now, there is much less of a tech-gap between the toy-box of the common man, and the armouries of government & the military. Over half a century ago, that differential was vast. Now, it's massively-reduced (but only in a relative way for any given individual, it can be said)
That's beyond doubt, though, with the caveat that many used/use remote transmitter sites (sitting immediately beside or under very high-power high-frequency radio transmission sources is not a good idea, as you're aware).he precise timekeeping of the spy stations seems to suggest they were / are manned or automated to some extent though
That's beyond doubt, though, with the caveat that many used/use remote transmitter sites (sitting immediately beside or under very high-power high-frequency radio transmission sources is not a good idea, as you're aware).
There's a set of (to me, obvious) unjoined dots, though, in solving (or perhaps defusing) the numbers stations mystery. Classic voice-based aeronautical ATIS and meteorological radio transmissions tend to sound very like numbers stations, in terms of their style and feel (sometimes with the same voice-segments and 'announcers'). They sometimes appear also to share source locations, and (more arguably) might display certain frequency spectrum co-adjacencies. You will be aware, clearly, of the deliberate use of specific frequency bands based upon times of day/times of year and known propagation trends. There is also a much-looser (but arguably still-interpretable) correlation between choices of frequency, and source of transmission versus location of intended recipient.
My postulation is also that as well as being (arguably) somehow associated with HF aeronatical transmission systems (either as a detectable/deceptive 'front', or as an inferrable reality), numbers stations are not related to much-older nautical HF or governmental PTT utility services. They are a contemporaneous post-WW2 / Cold War / "Air Age" phenomenon, that may have provided (provide?) a simultaneous tactical utility function in parallel with a strategic effect.
A couple of the contributors mention the fact that the stations first appeared in great numbers in the very early 1970s and added that the number groups are read out in 'synthesised voices'; one chap stating quite plainly, 'it's a computerised / synthesised / whatever female voice". Now, listening to the recordings of those old stations, many no longer broadcasting, it occurs to me that they don't sound like anything of the sort. I can't claim any knowledge of the state of digital voice synthesis in the 1970s, but remember how ropey it was in the eighties and nineties. The spoken numbers sound to me like individual recordings that have been somehow sequenced in the desired order.
If there were live readers in some cases what happened if they made a mistake on air? Firing squad at dawn?