{"id":7550,"date":"2013-10-11T09:54:24","date_gmt":"2013-10-11T13:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/swling.com\/blog\/?p=7550"},"modified":"2013-10-11T10:07:48","modified_gmt":"2013-10-11T14:07:48","slug":"pavels-70s-era-recording-of-a-german-numbers-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/swling.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/pavels-70s-era-recording-of-a-german-numbers-station\/","title":{"rendered":"Pavel’s 70s era recording of a German numbers station"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"towers\"<\/a>I read this account Pavel posted on the Spooks reflector<\/a> and asked if he would share his story on the SWLing Post. \u00a0He kindly agreed.<\/p>\n

Pavel writes:<\/p>\n

“Inspired by a recent thread about a vintage number station, I searched my\u00a0old tapes (I really [have a] LOT of them, hundreds of reels, mostly with music,\u00a0but sometimes with other interesting things) and finally found a short\u00a0snippet of a German number station transmission. There is neither a start\u00a0nor end of the transmission, just a few 5-digit groups.\u00a0\u00a0 It was recorded sometime between 1977 – 1980, at my cottage near\u00a0Ceska Lipa, Czech Republic (but it was Czechoslovak Socialistic Republic<\/a>\u00a0[then]).<\/p>\n

Reception was made on a Czechoslovak tube receiver “Barcarola<\/a>”\u00a0on a shortwave band with classic AM (of course this receiver was not capable\u00a0of SSB or any other advanced modes) using a random wire (about 10 m)\u00a0antenna.<\/p>\n

A recording was made on the B400 Czechoslovak tape recorder<\/a>\u00a0using a Scotch 220 magnetic tape (exactly the one which is in the picture<\/a>),\u00a0speed 9.53 cm\/s.\u00a0Import to the digital domain was performed using the Audacity<\/a> open source\u00a0sound recording and processing software, without any artificial filtering\u00a0or other DSP techniques.<\/p>\n

As you can hear,<\/a> it was perfect, clear readability:
\n