{"now":"2026-09-16T22:39:22.135Z","families":{"voice":{"label":"Voice","blurb":"A person reading figures aloud."},"marker":{"label":"Channel marker","blurb":"A transmitter saying nothing, on purpose, for decades."},"morse":{"label":"Morse","blurb":"Figures sent as code. No voice at all."},"digital":{"label":"Digital","blurb":"Traffic as a data burst. Nothing a person could copy."},"unexplained":{"label":"Unexplained","blurb":"Logged, repeatedly, and never accounted for."}},"stations":[{"id":"lincolnshire-poacher","patch":"lincolnshire-poacher.patch","designator":"E03","name":"The Lincolnshire Poacher","family":"voice","language":"English","voice":"Woman, recorded, southern English","mode":"AM","site":"Akrotiri, Cyprus (by direction-finding)","attributed":"Secret Intelligence Service — unconfirmed","active":"c. 1970s – 30 June 2008","status":"off-air","freqs":[11545,8464,6959,5422],"schedule":["1200","1300","1400"],"intervalSignal":"Two bars of the folk song, synthesised, played twice and repeated for several minutes","blurb":"A folk tune played by a machine, then an English woman reading five-figure groups. The most famous station there has ever been.","listenFor":"The hinge. The tune does not stop and then the voice start — they cross over about ten seconds, and there is a stretch where you have both and neither.","description":["If you have heard one numbers station, it was this one. From some time in the 1970s until the thirtieth of June 2008, a transmitter put out five-figure groups in an English woman's voice, and prefaced every transmission with the first two bars of \"The Lincolnshire Poacher\" — an eighteenth-century song about a man who is extremely pleased with himself — played twice, over and over, for several minutes before anybody said a number.","Direction-finding put the transmitter at Akrotiri, the British sovereign base on Cyprus. Nobody has confirmed that and nobody is going to. It had a sister station, E03a, which did the same job from Guam with \"Cherry Ripe\" instead of the Poacher, and both of them went off the air on the same Monday in 2008.","The part everybody remembers is the interval signal, and the reason they remember it is that it is WRONG. It was not a recording of anybody playing. It was synthesised, on something cheap, with the notes sitting slightly apart from where a person would put them and no expression on any of them at all. A folk song is a thing people sing in a room. This was the shape of one, generated by a machine, transmitted at a government's expense to nobody you can name.","That gap — between the tune and the rendering of the tune — is the whole feeling of the station, and our reconstruction is careful about it. The interval signal here is a bell and a square wave and nothing else. No swing. No dynamics. Every note exactly as long as every other note."],"conditions":{"kHz":5422,"signal":0.738,"drift":0.387,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44434","bandPos":0.368,"readable":true,"band":"55 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":48038,"nextAtUTC":"1200","windowMin":45,"kind":"hours","wait":"13 h 20 m","ends":null,"timetable":"1200 · 1300 · 1400 UTC, ~45 min each","hours":[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]},"own":0.604,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":232},{"id":"e03a-cherry-ripe","patch":"e03a-cherry-ripe.patch","designator":"E03a","name":"Cherry Ripe","family":"voice","language":"English","voice":"Woman, recorded, southern English — the same voice as E03","mode":"AM","site":"Guam (by direction-finding)","attributed":"Secret Intelligence Service — unconfirmed","active":"c. 1970s – 30 June 2008","status":"off-air","freqs":[14487,13375,11545,9251],"schedule":["0900","1100","1300"],"intervalSignal":"A phrase of the Regency song, synthesised the same way as its sister","blurb":"The Poacher's twin, run from Guam with a different English song. Same voice, same format, other side of the world.","listenFor":"The path. Guam to anywhere is open Pacific — more flutter, a quieter noise floor, and a heterodyne that wanders much further than Europe's.","description":["The same station, run from the other side of the world. A transmitter on Guam put out five-figure groups in an English woman's voice and prefaced every transmission with a few bars of \"Cherry Ripe\", a Regency drawing-room song about a girl selling fruit. It is generally attributed to the same service as E03, and as ever nobody in a position to confirm that has confirmed it.","The pair is the interesting thing, not either half. Two transmitters, fourteen thousand kilometres apart, running an identical format with an identical voice and two different English songs, covering between them every longitude that mattered — and then both switched off on the same day. A listener in Europe heard the Poacher; a listener in Asia heard this; neither could hear the other; and the only reason anybody knows they were the same system is that a few hundred hobbyists compared notes.","What is different is the path, and our reconstruction puts most of its effort there. Guam to anywhere is a long hop over open ocean with no useful ground wave, so this one arrives with more fading, a lower noise floor — there is nobody out there making noise — and a heterodyne that drifts further, because the ionosphere over an ocean at night is doing more moving than the one over Europe."],"conditions":{"kHz":14487,"signal":0.04,"drift":0.802,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"13221","bandPos":0.978,"readable":false,"band":"21 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":37238,"nextAtUTC":"0900","windowMin":45,"kind":"hours","wait":"10 h 20 m","ends":null,"timetable":"0900 · 1100 · 1300 UTC, ~45 min each","hours":[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,1,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]},"own":0.498,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":183},{"id":"swedish-rhapsody","patch":"swedish-rhapsody.patch","designator":"G02","name":"Swedish Rhapsody","family":"voice","language":"German","voice":"Young girl, recorded, reading German numerals","mode":"AM","site":"Warsaw Pact — probably Poland","attributed":"Polish intelligence — unconfirmed","active":"c. 1950s – late 1990s","status":"off-air","freqs":[5340,4270,3370],"schedule":["1800","1900","2000"],"intervalSignal":"A music box — cylinder and comb — on a tape loop","blurb":"A music box, then a little girl reading numbers in German. The one people find upsetting.","listenFor":"The wow is on the clock, not the notes. That is where the wobble in a wound mechanism actually comes from: not the pitch of a note, the speed of the thing carrying it.","description":["Catalogued G02. Collectors named it after Hugo Alfvén's \"Swedish Rhapsody\" because that is what the interval signal sounded like to whoever wrote the first log; the tune is more usually identified as the Luxembourg Polka, and it was not played, it was turned — a music box, cylinder and comb, recorded once and put on a tape loop. Then a young girl's voice read five-figure groups in German.","It is the one people find upsetting, and it is worth being precise about why, because it is not the girl and it is not the tune. It is that both of them are recordings. Somewhere there was a reel, and somebody's job was to start it. The child was a child once, for about ninety seconds, in a room with a microphone, and then she was a machine part for thirty years.","So the reconstruction is built as a mechanism rather than as a performance. The cylinder is a bell struck on a grid with no dynamics — every note the same weight, because a comb tooth does not know what a phrase is. The wow is on the clock itself, about half a percent, slowly. The girl is a voice at 330 Hz with the breath nearly off, because a child's voice with no breath in it is the whole effect and it costs one parameter.","The box does not stop when she starts. It goes down, and it stays under her."],"conditions":{"kHz":4270,"signal":0.52,"drift":0.225,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"35343","bandPos":0.219,"readable":true,"band":"70 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":69638,"nextAtUTC":"1800","windowMin":25,"kind":"hours","wait":"19 h 20 m","ends":null,"timetable":"1800 · 1900 · 2000 UTC, ~25 min each","hours":[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,0,0,0]},"own":0.312,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":207},{"id":"atencion","patch":"atencion.patch","designator":"V02a / HM01","name":"Atención","family":"voice","language":"Spanish","voice":"Woman, Spanish, fast and overmodulated","mode":"AM / USB","site":"Near Havana, Cuba","attributed":"Dirección de Inteligencia — unconfirmed","active":"1960s – still on the air","status":"active","freqs":[11635,9063,8010,7887,6855,5898,5883],"schedule":["0400","0500","0600","2200","2300"],"intervalSignal":"None. It opens with the word and goes.","blurb":"Ninety miles away and not pretending otherwise. Loud, hot, clipped, and still running.","listenFor":"The last third. V02a became HM01, which reads the voice groups and then sends the rest as data — so most of a modern transmission is a noise nobody is meant to hear anything in.","description":["The Cuban station. A woman's voice, in Spanish, opening every transmission with \"Atención\" and then reading five-figure groups fast, hot, and slightly clipped, from a transmitter generally sited near Havana. It has been on the air in one form or another since the 1960s and it is on the air now.","Two things make it the odd one out. The first is that it is LOUD. The European stations sound like a secret: thin signals, careful voices, long silences. This one arrives overmodulated, runs its audio into the top of the transmitter, splatters across the neighbouring channels, and can be heard on a car radio in Florida. It is ninety miles away and it is not pretending otherwise.","The second is that it is the only station in this catalogue that got read out in court. In 2001 the transmissions were evidence at the trial of the Cuban Five: the FBI had the one-time pads, so the groups came out of the air as Spanish sentences and were entered into the record. A numbers station is normally a thing you can only describe. This is the one where somebody stood up and said what it had been saying.","It is still going, and it is worse now. V02a became HM01, which reads the voice groups and then sends the remainder as a digital burst, so the last third of a transmission is a texture rather than a voice."],"conditions":{"kHz":5883,"signal":0.244,"drift":0.69,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"23322","bandPos":0.418,"readable":true,"band":"51 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":1238,"nextAtUTC":"2300","windowMin":35,"kind":"hours","wait":"20 m 38 s","ends":null,"timetable":"0400 · 0500 · 0600 · 2200 · 2300 UTC, ~35 min each","hours":[0,0,0,0,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1]},"own":0.293,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":209},{"id":"e10","patch":"e10.patch","designator":"E10","name":"E10 — no nickname","family":"voice","language":"English","voice":"Woman, English, reading three-letter identifiers","mode":"AM / USB","site":"Israel (by direction-finding)","attributed":"Israeli intelligence — unconfirmed","active":"c. 1970s – 16 March 2011","status":"off-air","freqs":[9130,6840,5435,4270],"schedule":["every hour, on the hour"],"intervalSignal":"None. The identifier, repeated, is the whole opening.","blurb":"It had nothing to name it after: no tune, no buzz, no greeting. Most transmissions carried no message at all.","listenFor":"Whether this one has anything in it. The patch flips a coin at the top of every transmission, the way the real station did, and about one in five carries traffic. Nothing here knows which.","description":["E10 has no nickname, because it had nothing to name it after. From some time in the 1970s until the sixteenth of March 2011 it came up on schedule, said a three-letter identifier in an English voice — EZI, ULX, ART, PCD, FTJ, a couple of dozen of them over the years — repeated it, and in the great majority of cases stopped. No groups. No message. Just the letters, several times, and then the carrier went away.","The empty transmission is the entire reason this station matters. Every other station in the catalogue is saying something in a way designed to stop you knowing what. This is a station saying NOTHING, on schedule, at expense, for forty years — and doing it because the alternative is worse.","If traffic only went out when there was traffic, then the fact that a transmission happened at all would itself be the message, and an adversary counting transmissions would learn something on the days you were busy. So you transmit every day. The silence has to be indistinguishable from the silence.","Which means our reconstruction cannot decide in advance either. A coin is flipped at the top of every cycle and held for the whole of it; at the odds the real station kept, about one in five carries anything. Whether the stream you are listening to has a message in it is not written down anywhere. That is the correct amount of information to have."],"conditions":{"kHz":4270,"signal":0.755,"drift":0.309,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44444","bandPos":0.219,"readable":true,"band":"70 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":1238,"nextAtUTC":"2300","windowMin":8,"kind":"hourly","wait":"20 m 38 s","ends":null,"timetable":"every hour on the hour, ~8 min","hours":[1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1]},"own":0.487,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":293},{"id":"the-pip","patch":"the-pip.patch","designator":"S30","name":"The Pip","family":"marker","language":"Russian (rarely)","voice":"Man, Russian, on the rare occasions there is one","mode":"AM","site":"Russia","attributed":"Russian military — unconfirmed","active":"mid-1980s – still on the air","status":"active","freqs":[5448,3756],"schedule":["continuous"],"intervalSignal":"The pip itself. That is all there is.","blurb":"A short tone, roughly once a second, since the mid-1980s. The message is that there is no message.","listenFor":"The stop. When the voice comes up the pip does not fade — it stops dead, and the silence is the loudest thing on the frequency.","description":["A Russian channel marker. A short tone, roughly once a second, continuously, since some time in the mid-1980s. Now and then it stops and somebody reads something in Russian, and then it comes back. It belongs to a small family — UVB-76 buzzes, S32 squeaks, this one pips — and the family resemblance is the point: they are not broadcasts, they are occupancy.","That is worth stating plainly, because it is what makes a channel marker different from everything else here. The voice stations are transmitting a message and dressing it in a schedule. This one is transmitting NOTHING, deliberately, for forty years, so that the frequency is demonstrably in use and demonstrably working.","The pip is a receipt. It says: the transmitter has power, the antenna is connected, the allocation is ours, and somebody would notice within the second if any of that stopped being true.","It is also the smallest reconstruction in the catalogue by a long way, and most of what is in it is the band rather than the station. Two square waves six hertz apart through a narrow band-pass, a hundred-millisecond envelope, a clock at sixty-four to the minute. That is the transmitter. Everything else you can hear is six hundred miles of atmosphere and the receiver's own hiss, which is exactly the correct proportion."],"conditions":{"kHz":3756,"signal":0.802,"drift":0.383,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44434","bandPos":0.14,"readable":true,"band":"80 m"},"airing":{"on":true,"endsInSec":null,"nextInSec":0,"nextAtUTC":null,"windowMin":null,"kind":"continuous","wait":"now","ends":null,"timetable":"continuous - it does not stop","hours":[1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1]},"own":0.71,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Channel marker","airtime":0.98,"patchLines":188},{"id":"the-buzzer","patch":"the-buzzer.patch","designator":"UVB-76 / S28","name":"The Buzzer","family":"marker","language":"Russian (rarely)","voice":"Man, Russian, reading names and numerals — a few times a year","mode":"USB","site":"Naro-Fominsk, then Pskov (by direction-finding)","attributed":"Russian military — unconfirmed","active":"early 1980s – still on the air","status":"active","freqs":[4625],"schedule":["continuous"],"intervalSignal":"The buzz. Twenty-five times a minute, for forty years.","blurb":"4625 kHz. A buzz, roughly twenty-five times a minute, day and night, since before you were born.","listenFor":"The twenty years of buzzing between the messages, and the fact that somewhere there is a room where this is somebody's job.","description":["The most listened-to transmitter on earth that nobody can explain. UVB-76 has put out a short buzz roughly twenty-five times a minute, day and night, since the early 1980s, on 4625 kHz. Nobody official has ever said what it is for.","It is not the numbers that make it frightening — it is the twenty years of buzzing between them. Every few months the buzzer stops and a man reads a callsign and a string of Russian words and figures over the empty channel, and then the buzzing comes back and nothing else happens for another few months. The messages have been collected, transcribed and analysed by thousands of people for decades and they still mean nothing to anybody outside whatever room they are addressed to.","The frequency has an audience. When it moved transmitter sites in 2010 there were people watching. When somebody keyed a microphone over it in 2010 and left it open, that was news. It is a hobby, a vigil and a rumour mill attached to a sound with no content at all.","Our reconstruction is mostly buzz, as it should be: a tone amplitude-modulated hard enough to rasp, on for a second and a bit and off for a second, and that is the whole transmission — until the conductor decides a section is over, the buzzer stops dead, and a voice reads a group of numerals over the empty channel."],"conditions":{"kHz":4625,"signal":0.53,"drift":0.224,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"35344","bandPos":0.269,"readable":true,"band":"65 m"},"airing":{"on":true,"endsInSec":null,"nextInSec":0,"nextAtUTC":null,"windowMin":null,"kind":"continuous","wait":"now","ends":null,"timetable":"continuous - it does not stop","hours":[1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1]},"own":0.617,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Channel marker","airtime":0.98,"patchLines":347},{"id":"s32-squeaky-wheel","patch":"s32-squeaky-wheel.patch","designator":"S32","name":"The Squeaky Wheel","family":"marker","language":"Russian (rarely)","voice":"Man, Russian, brief and infrequent","mode":"AM","site":"Russia","attributed":"Russian military — unconfirmed","active":"c. 1990s – intermittent","status":"intermittent","freqs":[5473,3828],"schedule":["continuous when up"],"intervalSignal":"A squeak. It is so exactly the sound of a dry bearing that the name required no discussion.","blurb":"The third of the Russian markers, and the worst of them. Something needs oiling.","listenFor":"The contour. A pip is a machine and you stop hearing it. A squeak goes somewhere and comes back, and a thing that goes somewhere and comes back keeps getting handed to the part of your brain that deals with voices.","description":["A Russian channel marker in the same family as the Pip and the Buzzer, and by common consent the most unpleasant of the three. Roughly once a second it emits a short tone that slides — up and then down, or down and then up, never quite the same twice — and the result is so exactly the sound of a dry bearing turning that the monitoring community named it after one without discussion.","What makes S32 worse than the Pip is the glide. A pip is a machine, and after ten minutes you stop hearing it. A squeak has a contour: it goes somewhere and it comes back, and a contour is what a voice has. So the ear keeps handing it to the part of the brain that deals with speech, and that part keeps handing it back, and you cannot settle into it.","Our reconstruction builds the contour as a fresh shape every squeak rather than a fixed sweep, so no two are the same, and adds a ring modulation against a tone nine hertz away — which is the dry-bearing rasp, and is the whole difference between a squeak and a whistle. The `wear` control is how much of that rasp is in the mix.","Now and then it stops, somebody reads a short group over the empty channel, and the wheel starts turning again."],"conditions":{"kHz":3828,"signal":0.498,"drift":0.257,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"34343","bandPos":0.151,"readable":true,"band":"78 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":3554,"nextAtUTC":"2338","windowMin":null,"kind":"marker-outage","wait":"59 m 14 s","ends":null,"timetable":"continuous, with outages of about 95 minutes","hours":[1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1]},"own":0.524,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Channel marker","airtime":0.98,"patchLines":194},{"id":"s06-russian-man","patch":"s06-russian-man.patch","designator":"S06","name":"The Russian Man","family":"voice","language":"Russian","voice":"Man, Russian, low and unhurried","mode":"AM / USB","site":"Russia","attributed":"SVR — unconfirmed","active":"c. 1970s – still on the air in some form","status":"active","freqs":[9145,7605,5473,4625],"schedule":["1700","1800","1900","2000"],"intervalSignal":"None. A call-up, repeated, until somebody has found it.","blurb":"A man in a room with a page of figures and no reason to be anywhere else.","listenFor":"The pace. There is a gap after every numeral and a longer gap after every group, and nothing in the delivery suggests anybody is in any danger.","description":["Catalogued S06, nicknamed the Russian Man for the only thing anybody could say about him with confidence. A male voice, in Russian, reading a three- or four-figure call-up over and over until somebody was supposed to have found it, then a group count, then the groups, then \"konets\", and the carrier went away. It ran from at least the 1970s and versions of it are running now.","What this station is about is the pace. Every other voice station has some idea that it is performing — a tune, a greeting, a data burst. S06 has none. It is a man in a room with a page of figures and no reason to be anywhere else, and the thing that makes the recordings unbearable is that he is not reading them quickly.","There is a gap after every numeral. There is a longer gap after every group. Nothing about the delivery suggests that the person receiving it is in any danger, or that the person sending it thinks so, and that flatness is the entire character.","Our reconstruction runs the clock at seventy-six to the minute — about one numeral every eight hundred milliseconds — and sits the voice at 96 Hz, which is low enough that the receiver's 300 Hz high-pass takes the fundamental away entirely and leaves you listening to the harmonics of a man who is not there. That is what shortwave does to a bass voice, and it is most of why he sounds like that."],"conditions":{"kHz":4625,"signal":0.601,"drift":0.249,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"34444","bandPos":0.269,"readable":true,"band":"65 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":66038,"nextAtUTC":"1700","windowMin":30,"kind":"hours","wait":"18 h 20 m","ends":null,"timetable":"1700 · 1800 · 1900 · 2000 UTC, ~30 min each","hours":[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,0,0,0]},"own":0.247,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":245},{"id":"e06-english-man","patch":"e06-english-man.patch","designator":"E06","name":"The English Man","family":"voice","language":"English","voice":"Man, English, brisk and flat","mode":"AM / USB","site":"Russia (by direction-finding)","attributed":"SVR — unconfirmed","active":"c. 1970s – still on the air","status":"active","freqs":[9251,6855,5744,4782],"schedule":["0700","1300","1900","2100"],"intervalSignal":"None. A five-figure call-up, perhaps forty times.","blurb":"A call-up repeated forty times, the groups, and then five zeroes, twice, and off.","listenFor":"The ending. Five zeroes, said twice — the only courtesy in the entire format, and you know from the first one that it is over.","description":["The English Man. A male English voice, catalogued E06, reading a five-figure call-up perhaps forty times, then \"message, message\", then a group count, then the groups, then \"zero zero zero zero zero\" twice, and off. It has been logged since the 1970s and it is still logged now.","The thing worth building around is the ending, because E06 has one and almost nothing else on shortwave does. Five zeroes, twice, and then the carrier drops — and a listener who has sat through nine minutes of figures knows, from the first zero, that it is over. It is the only courtesy in the format.","Compare him with S06 next door in this catalogue. E06 reads at a good clip; S06 does not. The difference between a fast reader and a slow one turns out to be the difference between a man doing a job and a man being made to do one, and both of them are on the air this evening.","The transmitter is clean. This one always came in well: a strong carrier, a little AGC pumping on the peaks, and much less of the polar flutter that S06 arrives with. If your receiver is finding it at all, it is readable."],"conditions":{"kHz":4782,"signal":0.767,"drift":0.315,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44444","bandPos":0.29,"readable":true,"band":"63 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":30038,"nextAtUTC":"0700","windowMin":30,"kind":"hours","wait":"8 h 20 m","ends":null,"timetable":"0700 · 1300 · 1900 · 2100 UTC, ~30 min each","hours":[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,1,0,0]},"own":0.617,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":192},{"id":"g06-german-lady","patch":"g06-german-lady.patch","designator":"G06","name":"The German Lady","family":"voice","language":"German","voice":"Woman, German, low and careful","mode":"AM / USB","site":"Russia (by direction-finding)","attributed":"SVR — unconfirmed","active":"c. 1980s – 2000s","status":"off-air","freqs":[6870,5820,4479],"schedule":["1900","2000","2100"],"intervalSignal":"None. \"Achtung\", and a five-figure call-up.","blurb":"\"Achtung\", and then every group read twice. Repetition is what you do when you cannot ask for a repeat.","listenFor":"That the repeat really is a repeat. The two groups are written out twice each in the patch, so the figures you hear the second time are literally the same entries in the same list — not a second draw that happens to look similar.","description":["The German Lady. Catalogued G06: a female voice reading German numerals, opening with \"Achtung\" and a five-figure call-up, and — this is what distinguishes it from everything else in the catalogue — reading every group TWICE. Once, a beat, then again. It ran from the 1980s into the 2000s and its schedule was regular enough that people set watches by it.","Repetition is what you do when you cannot ask for a repeat. There is no back channel on a one-way transmission: if the listener misses a figure under a burst of static, the figure is gone. So you send everything twice and accept that the transmission takes twice as long and costs twice as much power.","The format is an admission that the path is bad. That is the idea the reconstruction is built on, and it is why the groups are written out twice each rather than generated: a repeat has to be a repeat. An earlier version of this patch turned a shift register over every second clock, which changed the figure every other numeral and produced each digit said twice instead of each group. That is a mechanism that only rhymes with the idea, and it was worse than none.","The voice is at 224 Hz, which is a woman speaking low and carefully, and the rate is a fraction under natural, because German numerals are longer than English ones and the operator did not hurry them."],"conditions":{"kHz":4479,"signal":0.936,"drift":0.366,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"54544","bandPos":0.249,"readable":true,"band":"67 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":73238,"nextAtUTC":"1900","windowMin":25,"kind":"hours","wait":"20 h 20 m","ends":null,"timetable":"1900 · 2000 · 2100 UTC, ~25 min each","hours":[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,0,0]},"own":0.707,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":171},{"id":"e11-oblique","patch":"e11-oblique.patch","designator":"E11","name":"Oblique","family":"voice","language":"English","voice":"Woman, English, unaccented and unhurried","mode":"AM / USB","site":"Europe (by direction-finding)","attributed":"Unknown","active":"c. 1980s – 2000s","status":"intermittent","freqs":[9130,6840,5426],"schedule":["0800","1000","1500"],"intervalSignal":"None. The identifier, repeated, for about two minutes.","blurb":"Named after a punctuation mark, because she read the slash out loud.","listenFor":"Whether there is a message at all. Most transmissions ended on the word \"out\", and ours flips the same coin.","description":["The station is catalogued E11 and everybody calls it Oblique, because its identifier was a three-figure number, a slash, and a two-figure number, and the woman reading it said the slash out loud. \"Three two one, oblique, three five.\" Over and over, for two minutes. Then either a message, or the word \"out\", and the carrier went.","There is something worth noticing in that. A station that says its slash is a station reading off a page — the identifier was written down somewhere with an actual oblique stroke in it, and the person at the microphone read the document rather than the number.","Every other choice in these formats is about making the transmission impossible to attribute: the flat delivery, the absent callsign, the anonymous voice. This one leaks a filing convention.","Our reconstruction keeps the coin. E11 usually had nothing to send, and a flip at the top of each cycle decides whether this one does, held for the whole transmission. Rather more than a third of them carry traffic; the rest end on a single falling syllable where the message would have been."],"conditions":{"kHz":5426,"signal":0.689,"drift":0.368,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44444","bandPos":0.368,"readable":true,"band":"55 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":33638,"nextAtUTC":"0800","windowMin":20,"kind":"hours","wait":"9 h 20 m","ends":null,"timetable":"0800 · 1000 · 1500 UTC, ~20 min each","hours":[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,1,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]},"own":0.636,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":239},{"id":"m12-the-cluster","patch":"m12-the-cluster.patch","designator":"M12","name":"The Cluster","family":"morse","language":"None — International Morse","voice":"No voice. Machine-keyed CW at about 18 wpm.","mode":"CW","site":"Russia (by direction-finding)","attributed":"SVR — unconfirmed","active":"c. 1970s – still on the air","status":"active","freqs":[8127,7554,6930,5422],"schedule":["many, in clusters of three"],"intervalSignal":"A long unbroken carrier before the traffic, to let you finish tuning.","blurb":"A numbers station with nobody reading. Figures in Morse, machine-keyed, since the 1970s.","listenFor":"That you can still hear it when the band has gone. A tone survives noise that a word cannot, which is the whole reason this format outlived the others.","description":["The odd one out: a numbers station with nobody reading. M12 sends its figures in Morse, at about eighteen words a minute, machine-keyed, and it has been doing so since the 1970s. The format is a call-up repeated, a group count, a long tone, and then the traffic — and the whole thing arrives as two states of nothing: key down and key up.","It is worth being clear about why a station would choose this. A voice needs a clean channel; Morse needs almost none. A CW signal barely above the noise is still copyable by a human ear, because the ear will pull a tone out of hiss long after it has stopped being able to pull a word out of it. So the stations that had to reach the furthest, or be heard on the worst days, sent code. This is the one you can still read when the band has gone.","The reconstruction has no voice in it at all. There is a sine at 760 Hz — the pitch an operator would tune for, because it sits where the ear is sharpest and where a narrow filter can be closed around it — and two envelopes, one seventy milliseconds long and one two hundred, which is the dit and the dah and the entire vocabulary.","The rhythm comes from four patterns at co-prime lengths, and nothing about it is a real message. What it gets right is the statistics: the ratio of dits to dahs, the way letters clump and then break, and the fact that it never repeats inside a listening session. Those are the properties your ear is actually using when it decides that something in the noise is being sent on purpose.","The keying is deliberately soft-edged. A transmitter that switches a carrier on with a square corner splatters clicks for several kilohertz either side, which is the first thing anybody's licence tells them not to do, and the machines that sent this were built by people whose job was not being noticed."],"conditions":{"kHz":5422,"signal":0.761,"drift":0.396,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44434","bandPos":0.368,"readable":true,"band":"55 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":8438,"nextAtUTC":"0100","windowMin":18,"kind":"hours","wait":"2 h 20 m","ends":null,"timetable":"0100 · 0300 · 0800 · 1100 · 1600 · 2000 · 2200 UTC, ~18 min each","hours":[0,1,0,1,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,1,0,1,0]},"own":0.706,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Morse","airtime":0.46,"patchLines":159},{"id":"f01-magnetic-fields","patch":"f01-magnetic-fields.patch","designator":"F01","name":"Magnetic Fields","family":"voice","language":"French","voice":"Woman, French","mode":"AM / USB","site":"France (by direction-finding)","attributed":"DGSE — unconfirmed","active":"c. 1980s – 1990s","status":"off-air","freqs":[6825,5170,4020],"schedule":["2000","2100"],"intervalSignal":"A sequencer riff, lifted off a record that had sold fifteen million copies","blurb":"The only station here that opened with a pop record. A clandestine transmitter playing Jean-Michel Jarre.","listenFor":"The collision. A sequencer riff is tight, quantised and bright; three kilohertz of receiver bandwidth is none of those things.","description":["The French station, catalogued F01 and universally called Magnetic Fields, because its interval signal was lifted off a Jean-Michel Jarre album. For several minutes before the figures, a clandestine transmitter in France played a sequencer riff that anybody in Europe could have hummed, and then a woman read groups in French.","Every other station in this catalogue chose an interval signal that was anonymous — a folk tune nobody could place, a music box, a bare tone. This one chose the most recognisable synthesiser record of its decade. The usual reading is that somebody in the transmitter hall had the LP and thought it sounded appropriately technical, and the usual reading is probably right.","What it means in practice is that F01 is the only station here that is instantly identifiable by a listener who has never heard of numbers stations, which is a very strange property for a covert channel to have.","The riff in our reconstruction is not that record — it is a sequence in the same register and rhythm, because the point is the shape of a machine arpeggio arriving on shortwave, and a transcription would be somebody else's tune. What the patch is really about is what the receiver does to it: everything above the fourth harmonic goes, the transients round off, and what arrives is a machine being made to sound like a memory of itself."],"conditions":{"kHz":4020,"signal":0.722,"drift":0.317,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44444","bandPos":0.182,"readable":true,"band":"75 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":76838,"nextAtUTC":"2000","windowMin":30,"kind":"hours","wait":"21 h 20 m","ends":null,"timetable":"2000 · 2100 UTC, ~30 min each","hours":[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,0]},"own":0.608,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":154},{"id":"v13-new-star","patch":"v13-new-star.patch","designator":"V13","name":"New Star Broadcasting Station","family":"voice","language":"Mandarin","voice":"Woman, Mandarin","mode":"AM","site":"Taiwan","attributed":"Republic of China military intelligence — unconfirmed","active":"c. 1970s – 2000s","status":"off-air","freqs":[13390,11430,9280,5290],"schedule":["0000","0100","1200"],"intervalSignal":"A struck metal chime, then a spoken station announcement","blurb":"The one that said its own name. A bell, an announcement, and then the figures.","listenFor":"The chime. Struck metal has inharmonic partials — the overtones are not whole multiples of the fundamental, which is why a bell has no clear pitch until it has been ringing for a moment.","description":["The New Star Broadcasting Station, catalogued V13. A Taiwanese transmitter, broadcasting in Mandarin toward the mainland, opening every transmission with a struck metal chime and a station announcement, and then reading figure groups. Unlike almost everything else in this catalogue it did not pretend to be nothing: it said its own name.","It is the station that makes the usual framing awkward. A numbers station is normally defined by its refusal to identify itself, and the machinery of the format — the anonymous voice, the bare figures, the absent callsign — exists to make attribution impossible. V13 announced itself on air, repeatedly, in a language chosen for a specific audience across a specific strait. Whatever the groups meant, the channel itself was not a secret and was not meant to be one.","The chime is the gesture, and the thing to get right about it is that it is struck metal and not a synthesiser bell. Our reconstruction uses a modal resonator with the inharmonicity pushed up, hit once and allowed to ring for four seconds over the noise floor with nothing else happening.","The voice is a tonal-language voice, which our synthesis cannot really do — it has ten numerals and one pitch. What it can do is have the pitch move, so each numeral gets its own contour, rising, falling or level. It is not Mandarin. It is a voice in which the pitch of a syllable is doing work, which is the part an ear notices first."],"conditions":{"kHz":5290,"signal":0.487,"drift":0.267,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"34343","bandPos":0.352,"readable":true,"band":"57 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":4838,"nextAtUTC":"0000","windowMin":40,"kind":"hours","wait":"1 h 20 m","ends":null,"timetable":"0000 · 0100 · 1200 UTC, ~40 min each","hours":[1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]},"own":0.521,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":128},{"id":"v24-korean-station","patch":"v24-korean-station.patch","designator":"V24","name":"The Korean Station","family":"voice","language":"Korean","voice":"Woman, Korean","mode":"AM","site":"Pyongyang","attributed":"North Korean intelligence — stated on air as an education broadcast","active":"1990s, silent from 2000, back from July 2016","status":"active","freqs":[6400,3480],"schedule":["0000","1600"],"intervalSignal":"A few bars of melody in the pentatonic register Korean folk music uses","blurb":"The only station here with a documented resurrection. It came back in 2016 after sixteen years of silence.","listenFor":"How clean it is. This is not a clandestine transmitter hiding on a dead frequency — it is a national broadcaster with a real antenna farm, and it arrives like one.","description":["Catalogued V24: a Korean-language station, a woman's voice, five-figure groups, opening with a few bars of melody. It was logged through the 1990s, went quiet, and then in July 2016 — after a gap of sixteen years — it started up again on Pyongyang Radio, reading \"review assignments for the geography lessons of the remote education university\" and then figures. It is still on.","It is the only station in the catalogue with a documented resurrection, and the resurrection is the interesting part. Every other entry here is about a format that ended: the Poacher stopped in 2008, E10 stopped in 2011, G02 went quiet in the 1990s, and the X series replaced all of them with data bursts nobody can hear.","V24 is what happens when a service decides the old way was better — not because it carries more, but because a five-figure group read aloud on a public broadcast band can be received on any radio in the country by somebody who owns nothing incriminating. A data burst needs a demodulator. A demodulator is evidence.","So our reconstruction is deliberately the cleanest in the catalogue: a high signal default, a low noise floor, almost no heterodyne, and the receiver's top end left open. Turn the signal down if you want it to sound like a secret. It did not sound like a secret."],"conditions":{"kHz":3480,"signal":0.659,"drift":0.378,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44434","bandPos":0.092,"readable":true,"band":"86 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":4838,"nextAtUTC":"0000","windowMin":45,"kind":"hours","wait":"1 h 20 m","ends":null,"timetable":"0000 · 1600 UTC, ~45 min each","hours":[1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]},"own":0.299,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":148},{"id":"xpa-polish-numbers","patch":"xpa-polish-numbers.patch","designator":"XPA","name":"Polish Numbers","family":"digital","language":"None — PSK data","voice":"No voice. A two-tone preamble and a data burst.","mode":"PSK / FSK","site":"Poland (by direction-finding)","attributed":"Polish intelligence — unconfirmed","active":"2000s – still on the air","status":"active","freqs":[10648,9330,8192,6912],"schedule":["0600","0700","1200","1300"],"intervalSignal":"A two-tone idle, running for nearly a minute, so that a demodulator can find the carrier","blurb":"The end of the story the rest of this catalogue tells. No voice, no figures, nothing a person could copy.","listenFor":"The preamble. It is the most patient sound here, because the thing listening to it is a machine, and a machine does not get bored.","description":["The X series is what happened when the numbers stations stopped using numbers. XPA opens with a long two-tone preamble, sends a short header, and then delivers its traffic as a burst of phase-shift keying that lasts a few dozen seconds and is over. No voice. No figures. Nothing a person could copy by ear.","This is the end of the story the rest of the catalogue tells, and it is worth being plain about what changed. A spoken station has to be readable by a human being with a receiver and a pencil, which caps how much it can send and forces it to be slow, redundant and audible.","A data burst has none of those constraints. It moves the same traffic in a twentieth of the time, with forward error correction instead of repetition, and it is on and off the air before a direction-finding fix can be taken. Everything that made the old stations haunting — the pace, the voice, the repetition, the schedule you could set a watch by — was a limitation, and the moment it could be removed, it was.","So this is deliberately the least beautiful thing in the catalogue, and what our reconstruction is built around is the preamble rather than the data. The two-tone idle runs for nearly a minute: two sines a few hundred hertz apart, alternated at a couple of hertz, completely regular, going nowhere. It exists so that a receiver's AGC can settle and a demodulator can find the carrier, and it is the most patient sound in this catalogue because a machine is listening to it.","Then the burst: the same two tones at fifty baud, which is what an ear makes of binary FSK, plus the wideband hash of the phase reversals either side. Forty seconds of that, and the frequency is empty again."],"conditions":{"kHz":6912,"signal":0.143,"drift":0.713,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"23222","bandPos":0.519,"readable":false,"band":"43 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":26438,"nextAtUTC":"0600","windowMin":12,"kind":"hours","wait":"7 h 20 m","ends":null,"timetable":"0600 · 0700 · 1200 · 1300 UTC, ~12 min each","hours":[0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]},"own":0.324,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Digital","airtime":0.3,"patchLines":158},{"id":"xm-backwards-music","patch":"xm-backwards-music.patch","designator":"XM","name":"The Backwards Music Station","family":"unexplained","language":"None","voice":"People insisted there was one. There was probably not one.","mode":"Unknown — possibly inverted SSB","site":"Unknown","attributed":"Nothing has ever been established","active":"late 1980s – 1990s","status":"off-air","freqs":[6900,4625,3850],"schedule":["irregular"],"intervalSignal":"None. There was no format to have one in.","blurb":"Long tones that swelled up out of nothing and stopped dead. Never read figures, never identified, never explained.","listenFor":"Yourself. A single moving formant is most of what a voice is, and your ear will build a sender for it whether or not there was one.","description":["Catalogued XM, and unlike everything else here there is no agreed story about it at all. From the late 1980s into the 1990s a signal turned up on various frequencies carrying what sounded like a recording being played in reverse: long tones that swelled up out of nothing and stopped dead, sometimes with a fragment of something almost melodic in them, sometimes howling, occasionally with what people insisted was a voice. It never read figures. It never identified. It went away.","The explanations, in descending order of how much anybody believes them: a tape machine running backwards in a transmitter hall; a jammer; a faulty single-sideband transmitter with its sidebands inverted, which genuinely does make speech come out backwards-sounding; and an actual deliberate signal of an unknown kind. The third is the boring answer and is probably the answer.","It is in the catalogue because of what it demonstrates rather than what it was. Every other station here is a format — a thing with a schedule, a structure and an intent you can describe even when you cannot read it. XM has none of those, and people assembled the melodies, the voices and the intent themselves, out of a swell and a noise floor, because a human being given an unexplained repeating sound will build a sender for it.","The whole reconstruction is one idea: an envelope with a long rise and no fall. That is the shape of a note played backwards — all the decay happening first, arriving at its loudest, and then cut off with the abruptness of a splice. Everything in the patch is that envelope on something different: a detuned chord, a resonant sweep, a band of noise, a struck thing that is never allowed to ring."],"conditions":{"kHz":4625,"signal":0.882,"drift":0.349,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"54444","bandPos":0.269,"readable":true,"band":"65 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":28200,"nextAtUTC":"0629","windowMin":22,"kind":"sporadic","wait":"7 h 50 m","ends":null,"timetable":"no timetable; up for ~22 min, roughly every 9 h","hours":null},"own":0.644,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Unexplained","airtime":0.34,"patchLines":177}]}