Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Carlos Latuff, who writes:
Hey Tom,
Check out this recording.
I heard it today on 16976 kHz USB, at 13h08 UTC, here in Tramandai coast, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
Maybe your readers may have an idea what is this CW about?
Thank you for sharing this, Carlos!
Post readers: If you can ID this station, please comment!
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Paul Walker, who recently shared this recording of an unidentified numbers station in Russian.
Paul recorded this on April 26, 2021 at 0218 UTC in McGrath, Alaska, on 11,615 kHz:
I’m not an expert on numbers station identification–if you can ID this station, please comment!
Update: Many thanks to a number of readers who have suggested that this is the “S06 Russian Man” station.
Image Credit: Wiki Logos Public Domain
Guest Post by Troy Riedel
In keeping with a popular theme here – “radio in/on TV & movies” – I wanted to share the following that I saw on the Science Channel (part of the Discovery Network):
Show: What on Earth?
S5 Ep2
Originally aired 1/15/19
The above referenced episode has a segment on Cuban Numbers Stations – it’s at minute-45 in the 60-minute broadcast version with commercials.
Of course the show’s premise is “what’s this” so the segment starts out (as every segment does) analyzing a satellite photo and shapes (that turn out to be antennas). This segment is more about the “set-up” than the numbers stations themselves. It’s not really geared for radio enthusiasts but rather as something that may interest the general viewer – that there are active “espionage” Cuban Numbers Stations, when & why they started, and a brief mention of the arrests of what eventually became known as the Cuban Five.
The entire segment is only 5-minutes (approximately the same length as their “non-feature”, or minor segments).
I know it’s available free On Demand via Dish Network & is likely available for free on other services. Again – this won’t enlighten anyone who already knows there are “Cuban Numbers Stations”, but it is nice to see shortwave radio on mainstream “educational” TV programs.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Richard Lacroix,
I was intrigued by your post, “The ghostly radio station that no one claims to run (BBC Future)”. I attempted to listening to the station on 4625 kHz from my home location here in Toronto, Ontario Canada but unfortunately could not receive the signal. WebSDR to the rescue. I managed to locate a couple of KiwiSDRs in Russia which yielded great reception of “The Buzzer”.
I figured that some readers may be interested in knowing what the buzzer sounds like. I have therefore included 2 recordings of the broadcast; the first in AM and the second in USB mode with a 3.2 kHz wide filter setting. I am also sharing a screen shot of the waterfall which clearly depicts the signal [see at top of post].
The Buzzer recorded July 18, 2020 at 01:07 UTC on 4625 kHz in AM mode:
The Buzzer recorded July 18, 2020 at 08:26 UTC on 4625 kHz in upper sideband mode:
Thank you for sharing this, Richard!
Like you, I have difficult receiving The Buzzer from North America (especially in summer conditions with QRN). That’s where KiwiSDRs really come to the rescue. Thanks again for sharing your recordings.
Because I keep my ear to the waves, as well as receive many tips from others who do the same, I find myself privy to radio-related stories that might interest SWLing Post readers. To that end: Welcome to the SWLing Post’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributors Skip Arey, David Goren, Paul Evans, Kanwar Sandhu and Dave Porter for the following tips:
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – The young technician shut off the electricity at a cellular tower in rural Mexico to begin some routine maintenance.
Within 10 minutes, he had company: three armed men dressed in fatigues emblazoned with the logo of a major drug cartel.
The traffickers had a particular interest in that tower, owned by Boston-based American Tower Corp (AMT.N), which rents space to carriers on its thousands of cellular sites in Mexico. The cartel had installed its own antennas on the structure to support their two-way radios, but the contractor had unwittingly blacked out the shadowy network.
The visitors let him off with a warning.
“I was so nervous… Seeing them armed in front of you, you don’t know how to react,” the worker told Reuters, recalling the 2018 encounter. “Little by little, you learn how to coexist with them, how to address them, how to make them see that you don’t represent a threat.”
The contractor had disrupted a small link in a vast criminal network that spans much of Mexico. In addition to high-end encrypted cell phones and popular messaging apps, traffickers still rely heavily on two-way radios like the ones police and firefighters use to coordinate their teams on the ground, six law enforcement experts on both sides of the border told Reuters.[…]
If you’ve been binge-watching movies lately, you may have come across “Pirate Radio.” Director Richard Curtis’ 2009 comedy-drama stars the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Count, a disc jockey for an unlicensed rock radio station that broadcast from a rusty, decrepit ship off the British coast in the mid-1960s, defying government authorities to spin the rock records that weren’t allowed on the BBC at the time. The plot is based loosely on the saga of an actual former pirate station, Radio Caroline, that was founded by an offbeat Irish entrepreneur named Ronan O’Rahilly, the inspiration for the character portrayed by Bill Nighy.
“Pirate Radio” is a period piece, set in a time when the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and the Who’s “My Generation” were still scandalous and controversial rather than nostalgic anthems for today’s aging baby boomers. So you couldn’t be blamed for assuming that it depicts a long-vanished phenomenon, like Nehru jackets with iridescent scarves and psychedelic-patterned paper mini dresses.
To the contrary, though, more than a half-century later, pirate radio is still a thing. In fact, it’s possibly more widespread than it was in the 1960s, even in an age when streaming internet services such as Spotify and Pandora put the equivalent of a jukebox in the pocket of everyone with a smartphone. And as a bonus, Radio Caroline still exists — though, ironically, it’s gone legal.[…]
[Note: Arqiva is the UK domestic broadcast transmission provider.]
Arqiva is working on a restructure of its business that could result in a third of its staff being made redundant.
According to a report in the Telegraph, the media infrastructure business is preparing to cut around 500 staff, which is approximately a third of its workforce.
An Arqiva spokesperson confirmed to IBC365 that some job losses will occur.
They said: “The sale of our telecoms business makes Arqiva a smaller organisation, changes our revenue profile and reduces our available profit pool.
”We are therefore conducting a review of the costs and systems we need to run our business over the next three years.
”Regrettably, we will need to reduce the size of our workforce, but it’s much too early to speculate about numbers.”
The Telegraph report cites the shift to streaming and a drop in income for broadcasters as reasons for the potential cuts.[…]
In the middle of a Russian swampland, not far from the city of St Petersburg, is a rectangular iron gate. Beyond its rusted bars is a collection of radio towers, abandoned buildings and power lines bordered by a dry-stone wall. This sinister location is the focus of a mystery which stretches back to the height of the Cold War.
It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, “MDZhB”, that no-one has ever claimed to run. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues.
Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4625 kHz.
It’s so enigmatic, it’s as if it was designed with conspiracy theorists in mind. Today the station has an online following numbering in the tens of thousands, who know it affectionately as “the Buzzer”. It joins two similar mystery stations, “the Pip” and the “Squeaky Wheel”. As their fans readily admit themselves, they have absolutely no idea what they are listening to.[…]
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Radio Waves: Stories Making Waves in the World of Radio Because I keep my ear to the waves, as well as receive many tips from others who do the same, I find myself privy to radio-related stories that might interest SWLing Post readers. To that end: Welcome to the SWLing Post’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributors, William Lee, Stana Horzepa, Rich Cuff, and Marty for the following tips:
This iconic Los Angeles landmark has been emitting secret messages since it opened. However, only those with a keen eye for Morse code can decipher what they say.
It was the former president of Capitol Records, Alan Livingston, who got the idea to have the light on top of the building send out a signal in Morse code. The word chosen for this secret message was “Hollywood.” When the building opened in 1956, Samuel Morse’s granddaughter Leila Morse had the honor of turning the light on.
Read the rest of the story at Atlas Obscura.
Some are interpreting this as meaning that – every – AM will be switching to digital leaving a Jillion AM only receivers with nothing to listen to (except for electrical gizmo noise). I give more credit than that to the owners of AM Radio Stations. I would highly doubt if any market would see all of their AM’s go digital. Perhaps in an ownership that had two AM’s it might make sense to have one of each.
[…]Other question is, what will the company that owns HD Radio (EXPERI) want to extract from the owner of an AM station that’s willing to put everything on the line and go all digital?
The bottom line is there appears to be a lot of interest in this proposal. The FCC’s process will likely draw a number of comments, pro and con. This will be an interesting process to watch. I can say one thing, never did I ever dream that we would be debating this issue![…]
The Buzzer
Numbers stations—shortwave radio transmissions of monotone coded messages—are inherently creepy. But call sign UVB-76 has outcreeped them all by playing the same jolting tone from Russia since 1982. Similar broadcasts are useful for sending messages where snoops might intercept digital comms, so “the Buzzer” could simply assist spies. But it plays far fewer words and digits than confirmed espionage outlets, so some suspect it’s a science project that bounces radio waves off the ionosphere to detect solar flares. The most intriguing theory posits that it’s a doomsday device that will go silent should Russia suffer a nuclear attack, thus triggering retaliation.
My theory is that these mysterious sounds are actually the intro to a Pink Floyd song, possibly from their 1969 album Ummagumma. Because the early Floyd albums, before Dark Side of the Moon, are no longer heard on-air, the Russians stole this music knowing we’d never notice. Ooh, gotta go… I hear the black helicopters coming…[…]
When iHeartMedia announced this month it would fire hundreds of workers across the country, the radio conglomerate said the restructuring was critical to take advantage of its “significant investments … in technology and artificial intelligence.” In a companywide email, chief executive Bob Pittman said the “employee dislocation” was “the unfortunate price we pay to modernize the company.”
But laid-off employees like D’Edwin “Big Kosh” Walton, who made $12 an hour as an on-air personality for the Columbus, Ohio, hip-hop station 106.7 the Beat, don’t buy it. Walton doesn’t blame the cuts on a computer; he blames them on the company’s top executives, whose “coldblooded, calculated move” cost people their jobs.[…]
Amateur radio enthusiasts have proved themselves useful during the recent bushfires after traditional telecommunication channels broke down.
Amateur radio, also known as ham radio, is a skill and international hobby whereby enthusiasts use specific radio frequencies to communicate with each other.
In Australia, users must complete an exam to obtain a license through the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).
It was volunteers with these skills who were called in to assist during the recent New South Wales bushfires.
Neil Fallshaw is vice-president of WICEN NSW Communications, a group of volunteers with amateur radio licenses who can help in emergency situations.
He said about 30 members provided a temporary radio system in the Bega, Cobargo, Narooma, and Bermagui areas after some of the local radio infrastructure was damaged or had lost power.
“We deployed one of our radio repeaters on the mountains. We put a radio repeater system on that mountain to cover a portion of the south coast,” Mr Fallshaw said.
He said that radio system assisted the NSW Volunteer Rescue Association and Bega Valley Shire Council staff to communicate from bushfire-affected towns like Bermagui and Cobargo.
“They normally use just mobile phones, but the mobile phones in the area were down because of fire damage,” Mr Fallshaw said.[…]
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Mark Hirst, who writes:
One of my favourite YouTube channels has just published a video talking about number stations.
There’s nothing there that seasoned SWLing.com readers don’t already know of course:
Thanks for sharing this, Mark! I just subscribed to Curious Droid!