Category Archives: Podcast

Pirate Radio Recordings: Radio Cinco De Mayo

Shortwave Radio Recordings: The Mighty KBC

The Art of Noise kicks off this Mighty KBC broadcast. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The Mighty KBC broadcast again early this morning (from 00:00-02:00 UTC) on their new summer frequency of 9,925 kHz. Their signal from Nauen, Germany was packing 125 kW–it was amazingly strong into North America. As we’ve come to expect, the KBC’s Giant Jukebox of music has a lot of rock-n-roll and Euro-pop variety, spanning the decades; DJ, “Uncle Eric” knows how to entertain and spin the tunes!

You can listen to the full recording below in the embedded player, or simply right click this link and save the MP3 file to your computer:

You’ll notice that Kim Elliott has another installation of digital text modes in this broadcast. Decode these digital modes using Fldigi from www.w1hkj.com. Be sure to check out Dr. Elliott’s VOA Radiogram website for full details about this broadcast.

Pirate Radio Recordings: Shrimp Boat Radio, WSBR (a.k.a. Freakin’ Awesome Radio, WFAR)

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“No shrimp? No problem!” Pirates on board! (Original source: Wikimedia Commons)

“We’re shrimpin,’ but they’re not bitin’!”

Last night, a very unique pirate radio station emerged from the static on 6,925 kHz USB: Shrimp Boat Radio. It seems a shrimp boat radio pirate found himself bored on board, due to a lack of shrimp–but his boredom became our gain with an offer to talk shrimpin,’ fishin,’ or just take music requests…live.

This is the stuff great pirate radio is made of. He started with a request for the Rolling Stones; next Black Cat Radio‘s Greaser Bob chimed in with a request for GNR. And there began an evening of pirate radio with live on-air requests.

You can tell that this was a completely impromptu production–and it was all the better for it. Not too long into the show, he took on the alternate name Freakin’ Awesome Radio (WFAR).

Hearing a live pirate radio request show was a first for me, and the sort of thing that gets this “content DXer” enthused. I’m glad I had the tape rolling! I hope he reappears on the band in the future.

Note that I start the recording at the very first announcement from WSBR. If you want to skip to the first music request, fast-forward to about 11 minutes into the recording (you’ll miss some great banter, though). There are a few long breaks of static in the recording where this pirate scrambled to find and play music requests, but this just adds to the authenticity.

Click here to download the full recording of Shrimp Boat Radio, or simply listen via the embedded player below. Enjoy!

Radio Panik injects shortwave audio into mixes

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I recently discovered that the radio show L’etranger, on Radio Panik, 105.4 in Brussels, used shortwave radio recordings of pirate radio and numbers stations, from the SWLing Post and other sources, in one of their mixes of eclectic music and sound clips.

The end result is a splendid piece of sonic art.

Note that their audio is only available on archive.org until May 23, 2013. Click here to download the show, or listen via the embedded player below. You can also hear the show on the L’etranger website.

Shortwave Radio Recordings: Rádio Nacional da Amazônia

Numbers station HM01…and Ana Montes

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Wednesday morning, I suppose I had number stations on the brain. It was no surprise, as I had just watched The Numbers Station the previous night. Nonetheless, I experienced a rather strange coincidence: I was reading an intriguing article about Ana Montes, “one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history,” when my shortwave radio–parked on 5,855 kHz–suddenly began to fire out an eerie series of numbers and data bursts from the Cuban numbers station, HM01. It was, unquestionably, the perfect accompaniment to the words I was reading.

A reader sent Montes’ story–written by Jim Popkin for The Washington Post Magazine–which made for fascinating reading. And as I read the account of Ana Montes’ rise in the ranks of the DIA, while simultaneously becoming one of Cuba’s most important spies, I remembered that it was actually Montes’ case that reader Dirk Rijmenants’ referred to in his paper, and that we posted earlier this year.

A “cheat sheet” provided by Cuban intelligence that
Ana Montes used to help her encrypt and decrypt
messages to and from her handlers. (Source: FBI)

Popkin’s account of Ana Montes’ life, character, promotions within the Defense and Intelligence Agency, and the sequence of events that led to her FBI investigation and imprisonment, are the stuff of spy novels. And of course, he mentions numbers stations:

[Montes’] tradecraft was classic. In Havana, agents with the Cuban intelligence service taught Montes how to slip packages to agents innocuously, how to communicate safely in code and how to disappear if needed.[…]

Montes got most of her orders the same way spies have since the Cold War: through numeric messages transmitted anonymously over shortwave radio. She would tune a Sony radio to AM frequency 7887 kHz, then wait for the “numbers station” broadcast to begin. A female voice would cut through the otherworldly static, declaring, “Atención! Atención!” then spew out 150 numbers into the night. “Tres-cero-uno-cero-siete, dos-cuatro-seis-dos-cuatro,” the voice would drone. Montes would key the digits into her computer, and a Cuban-installed decryption program would convert the numbers into Spanish-language text.[…]

On a side note, as Rijmenants points out, using a computer to decipher a numbers station was both unnecessary and risky.

The story continues:

Ana Montes

[…]On May 25, 2001, [an FBI team] slipped inside Apartment 20. Montes was out of town with Corneretto [her boyfriend], and the FBI searched her closets and laundry bins, paged through shelves of neatly stacked books and photographed personal papers. They spotted a cardboard box in the bedroom and carefully opened it. Inside was a Sony shortwave radio. Good start, Lapp thought. Next, techs found a Toshiba laptop. They copied the hard drive, shut down the computer and were gone.[…]The documents, which Montes had tried to delete, included instructions on how to translate numbers-station broadcasts and other Spy 101 tips.[…][…]Later that day, an FBI evidence team scoured Montes’s apartment for hours. Hidden in the lining of a notebook they found the handwritten cipher Montes used to encrypt and decrypt messages, scribbled shortwave radio frequencies and the address of a museum in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where she was meant to run in an emergency. The crib sheets were written on water-soluble disappearing paper.[…]

The story Popkin recounts, though, paints the picture of a very complex operative. One who, until discovered, was very successful at her craft. She pulled the wool over the eyes of the DIA and spied for the Cuban government for many years.

The story is complex, and Popkins’ account somehow maneuvers through the twists and turns.

If you want to experience what I did–if a little less coincidentally–click here to read Popkin’s full article, and meanwhile play this recording I made of the Cuban numbers station HM01, below:

Note that the year Montes listened to the Cuban numbers station on 7,887 kHz, it only contained numbers–unlike the recording here of HM01 (Hybrid Mode 01) which contains both voice and RDFT data bursts (which you can also decode, but not necessarily decipher).

This recording of the Cuban numbers station HM01 was recorded on April 24, 2013, at 10:00 UTC on 5,855 kHz in AM. Click here to download the recording as an MP3.

Again, click here to read Jim Popkin’s full story of Ana Montes on The Washington Post Magazine website.