Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Richard Cuff, who notes the following recently-released suspense film:
Funny that shortwave is being used as a medium for “something sinister.” I do recall the film, Frequency, where extraordinary propagation helped a father and son communicate through time via shortwave.
I suppose, however, another recent film that brought the underground side of shortwave radio in the light was The Numbers Station with John Cusack and Malin Ackerman.
https://youtu.be/k1yGr_RmmHU
Any other shortwave-centric films I’m missing?
There seems to be two common modes of thought on movies or TV shows featuring amateur and/or shortwave radio. There are the purists who get rattled by any flub-up or inaccuracy, and there are those who are just happy to see radio being discussed at all. The movie Frequency was like that. Nice creative thinking, with obvious mistakes. But it put amateur radio in a good light. The numbers movie was a bit of a flight of fancy, but considering few people outside of the radio world know about it, and even many within are not aware of these stations, I was glad to see it be an integral part of a movie. Especially after what was discovered concerning those Soviet spies a few years before this movie came out.
Last Man Standing does a great job of showing amateur radio on tV – and no, it is not completely accurate, but the equipment looks cool, the characters acknowledge it as important, and it makes us look less like radio geeks when it is featured on a good show with Tim Allen. I for one like seeing any reference to our hobby, assuming its not some serial killer using amateur radio to find people!
Hollywood can make a blonde- gun- crash-and explosion-filled moronfest out of anything. Those in the intelligence community lowerarchy whose responsibilities include tending automated numbers stations are probably laughing themselves silly over this.
As to ‘Shortwave’, it’s just to marginalize and weirdify radio stuff that few in the modern audience would understand. Better not tell anyone you’re ‘into shortwave’.
That said, however, there is a genuine anomaly known as the Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP), sometimes also called Instrumented Transcommunication or ITC. An excellent and sober nonfiction documentary about it is Calling Earth by Daniel Drasin:
The Numbers Station film was entertaining and I enjoyed watching it, but showing the female lead reading out the numbers was odd, since it’s evident even in the film’s own sound track (and we know in the real world) that speech synthesisers take care of that chore.