Almost all of the information we have on these numbers stations is due to hobbyists listening, sourcing, and sometimes attempting to decode the stations with their own radios. The communities of hobbyists are vast – and their logging can be prolific. There is the Spooks Spy Numbers Station Mailing List, the Conet Project (which compiles recordings of shortwave), the Spy Numbers Station Database, and many others. They keep track of the frequency, the time, the numbers, and sometimes record audio each time spooks hear a Numbers broadcast. These shortwave enthusiasts sometimes spend hours trying to locate the source of these broadcasts – sometimes, to no avail. (read the whole thing)Before we had a black and white television, we had, I should say my father had a short wave radio. No one was allowed to touch it. It was truly fascinating to a kid like me to hear a station say where they were broadcasting from and then find it on a map in a geography book. The cleanest most reliable broadcast was from a station in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Do you have any short wave radio stories?
16 comments:
We use portable short wave radios in hang gliding to communicate to each other in flight and from the ground. We all have to have radio licenses, and use our call numbers.
What happens occasionally is that a pilot will have a shorted wire or malfunctioning microphone button that will lock the radio in transmit mode. Since we are mostly all on the same frequency, everybody has to listen to him breathing and grunting and swearing for hours, and no one can communicate with anyone until he lands and turns it off or his battery goes dead. It's pretty embarrassing. I know cause it happened to me once. I never admitted it was me, nobody asked, and there is no way to know who it was, so lets keep it on the down low.
Radio-activity . . . is in the air for you and me.
Sorry Sam. We only have room for one illegal immigrant blog.
Quotas' doncha know.
Late fifties early sixties when I was an young teen I had a Hallicrafters SWB radio, receive only. From Jacksonville FL I remember being able to pick up stations in S. American, even Europe when conditions were just right. Remember being fascinated with the sound of the CBE as well... kept a log of date/time station received, etc. Lots of hours in the middle of the night, then I discovered there were other ways (females) of spending my time. Too bad in a way, could have been a great lifetime hobby.
Sammy, I checked out your site - first thing I saw was underwear for "women of color". A couple of things - white is a color, too, and we stopped using the phrase "colored women" here in this country a long time ago.
Actually, your site used the words "woman of color" - which was either a typo or more Spanglish, and lord knows we have more than enough of that around here.
Keep in mind that Trooper knows people, so if you are thinkin' of selling bras in his territory, tread lightly.
Just the afternoon I listened on my bicycle to a morse contact between Phil in Kansas and Rolf "near Stuttgart."
I would say conversation except hams don't ever say anything except 4 standard items, but the morse is nice to listen to.
14.007 MHz.
Radio Japan used to be good, because they had interviews with Japanese with bad English accents that were great to listen to.
They cut the budget a few years ago and now are only interesting for news.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/rj/podcast/mp3/english.mp3
(changes a couple times a day, I think. They seem to play a version for your time zone.)
14.007 MHz.
So the bandwidth is between AM and FM? What is it about shortwave that makes it carry so?
My dad had a Hallicrafters when I was a kid and collected cards from the different stations he contacted.
He even got Japan to say, "Herro", to me on my birthday.
For 1955, it was pretty cool.
One of my grandfathers was a listener to shortwave radio. I don't know what kind of radio he had - it was receive only - but he got a lot of entertainment listening to radio broadcasts form other parts of the world.
I was going to become a HAM radio operator a few years back, until I started to add up the costs of equipment and antennas and so forth. The hobby has come a long way since the days of HAMS making their own inexpensive equipment.
I walked into this place one Saturday afternoon, balked at the prices, and bought something simple - a police scanner - and left.
14.007 MHz.
So the bandwidth is between AM and FM? What is it about shortwave that makes it carry so?
Glad you asked. Ions.
In the upper atmosphere, the ionosphere, there are positive ions and free electrons, stripped from each other by energy from the sun.
If you put an electric field on an ionized gas, called a plasma, the electrons move one way and the (positive) ions the other way, until the net effect cancels the electric field.
If you remove the electric field, the plasma moves back the other way, like a giant bedspring, and oscillates back and forth in the electric field it is applying to itself. The frequency of this oscillation is called the plasma frequency. The more ionized, the higher the plasma frequency.
Now, a radio wave at less than the plasma frequency gives the plasma time to adjust itself to cancel the radio wave, and so the radio wave is reflected from the ionized gas.
Radio waves at higher than the plasma frequency don't give the plasma time to cancel them, and make it through.
Radio waves that make it through the ionosphere are lost into space. That would be TV and FM, for instance.
They're called line of sight because if you can't see the antenna, you can't hear the radio waves.
Low frequency, ie AM and shortwave, all get reflected by the ionosphere.
When the sun is up, the ionosphere is more ionized, and higher shortwave frequencies are reflected; at night, they're line-of-sight too.
Another effect of the sun is that it ionizes the lower levels of the atmosphere, the D layer. The mean free path of gas particles is pretty small in the D layer. If you run a low frequency (AM radio) wave into a daytime D layer, it moves the electrons and positive ions like it's supposed to, but the low frequency gives them time to move into a collision with uncharged particles, and that energy is lost to heat. So rather than reflecting, the too-low frequencies are absorbed by the ionized D layer.
So in summary, in the day, TV and FM go straight through the ionosphere into space and are lost, and AM radio gets absorbed before it can be reflected. The same absorption is true of the lower shortwave frequencies.
Only certain shortwave, in the middle of these two, gets reflected and not absorbed, and so can be heard on multiple bounces around the world.
In the nighttime, the D layer is not ionized and AM radio is not absorbed so it too is reflected by the ionoshpere, and you can hear coast to coast on AM radio, which winds up as a mish-mash of thousands of stations up and down the band.
In the nighttime, upper shortwave frequencies no longer reflect and are lost. Lower shortwave frequencies be heard coast to coast as well.
Great reply, rhhardin. Thanks for that!
Thank you rhhardin for that very educating post. Seriously.
(PS: I adore your new dog Julie...you cannot post too much or too often on how you handle her, please do that more often...your approach is very close to what we called "natural" when dealing with horses and is something I began around age 8 with horses, by 10 it was my only way...and it worked, even for cross country eventing.)
As a child in WWII I was too young to grasp what "Short wave" could do, but my parents were not...they utilized it to talk to relatives and friends in England during the war, and vice versa. By the time WWII ended and Korean War was approaching I was savvy enough to use a great receiver-only multi-band short wave radio,(big wooden box with many tubes and a linear dial with a switch for various bands) that my father bought me, and it was my entertainment in the evenings up through most of grammar school (e.g, 6th grade). Besides letting me listen to Mom and Dad's exchanges with England, it was my constant companion while doing homework (yeah in the late 40's and early 50's we had "homework" every night) and also for various entertainment shows on the AM band...it was actually more intriguing than the TV stuff that we did not get until I was 10+ years old.
Later on, at age 13-17, I was in high school in the northern boondocks of Michigan (one other poster here went there too and knows what I mean) on the Lake Michigan's shore, with a large hill behind us that blocked all AM but that from down lake and the south and west. I had a portable Short Wave, FM, and AM bands radio, and some us were entranced by the radio calls when the SS Carl Bradley was sinking during a storm 18 Nov 1958 near Beaver Island. I was 15 going on 16 and it was the first time I heard the words of men dying. Only 4 survived initially and 2 of them died trying to reach land ... froze to death I think. Memory of that was to help me later in life as I went off to war. Shit happens, just is, duck when you can, but never run.
That November was my first year at the school and the first big storm while I was there. Being right on the lakeshore, storms were memorable. On a happier note, the radio memory I have of the place is that year or the following, two students who were brothers built their own radio station, broadcasting on I don't know what kind of band. So for a few months, those within a hundred yards of their room could kind of hear '50's R&R played on 45's, as well as local "news".
Poppa India ... I recall the "local" station. It was set up in one of the cabins and operated on an AM frequency with a low power transmitter. It didn't interfere with regular AM due to Prospect Hill right behind the group of cabins...e.g., few AM stations could cross that hill in to the swale where the school resided along the Crystal River and the only reliable AM radio we could receive came across or up Lake Michigan....mostly Chicago, Memphis, or Nashville mega power stations. The guys picked a frequency that wasn't used by those mega power stations, so they did not get "stepped on". I don't think the broadcasts could be heard outside of a mile or so, if that, and then only on the West side of Prospect Hill.
I don't recall the school honchos attitude about it, but I do know "Snafu" didn't mind it and he was the guy who crept around at night and could have stopped it if he wanted. He didn't.
Poppa India...I figure you recall "Snafu" aka Warren Howe, one of the boys deans. We made fun of him due to his mannerisms and appearance (kids are cruel) but the truth is he was one of the best Deans ever at the school and intervened in several student personal crisis without bothering to advise the administration. He relieved many guys of their problems by listening. Just listening. I remember him taking a few of us, on his own time, with his own car, to Hickory Hills in Traverse City, to ski with our competitors, all alpine skiers, under the lights, on other wise boring winter Friday nights. He enabled many of us to continue to a relationship of many other ski racers all of us taught by Pepi Tiechner who by then had passed away from cancer.
I'm sure he is passed away by now, but I regret not having made it clear how much I respected him. So RIP "Snafu" you were more of a man than most of your contemporaries. My memories of you are all positive...and you forgave many of my numerous transgressions. So, thank you for your time in my life.
Post a Comment