{"now":"2026-11-13T22:13:01.112Z","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, and latterly USB with carrier","site":"Akrotiri, Cyprus (by direction-finding)","attributed":"Secret Intelligence Service — unconfirmed","active":"c. 1970s – July 2008","status":"off-air","freqs":[11545,8464,6959,5422],"schedule":["1200","1300","1400","1500","1600","1700","1800","1900","2000","2100","2200"],"intervalSignal":"Two bars of the folk song, electronically generated, played twelve times on the hour and again at 45 minutes past","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, which is ours and not the station's. The real one stopped the tune and started counting on a clean edge; here the two 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 July 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 over and over for ten minutes before anybody said a number, and twelve times more before the groups.","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 the two went quiet within eighteen months of each other.","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 — which goes further than the station did: the real tune kept the song's long notes and short ones, on a steady organ-like tone, and took out only the expression."],"conditions":{"kHz":5422,"signal":0.71,"drift":0.376,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44434","bandPos":0.368,"readable":true,"band":"55 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":49619,"nextAtUTC":"1200","windowMin":45,"kind":"hours","wait":"13 h 46 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":0.528,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":246},{"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":"USB","site":"Guam, then Humpty Doo, Northern Territory from September 2009 (by direction-finding)","attributed":"Secret Intelligence Service — unconfirmed","active":"c. 1970s – December 2009","status":"off-air","freqs":[23461,21866,18864,14730],"schedule":["0000","0100","0500","0700","1000","1100","1200","1300","1400","2200","2300"],"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 eleven thousand kilometres apart, running an identical format with an identical voice and two different English songs, covering between them every longitude that mattered. They did not end together: the Poacher stopped in the summer of 2008 and this one carried on until December 2009, the last two months of it from Australia. Europe mostly heard the Poacher and Asia mostly heard this, 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":23461,"signal":0.04,"drift":0.911,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"13211","bandPos":1,"readable":false,"band":"13 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":38819,"nextAtUTC":"0900","windowMin":45,"kind":"hours","wait":"10 h 46 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":0.65,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":194},{"id":"swedish-rhapsody","patch":"swedish-rhapsody.patch","designator":"G02","name":"Swedish Rhapsody","family":"voice","language":"German","voice":"Automated female voice reading German numerals — everybody hears a child","mode":"AM","site":"Poland","attributed":"Polish intelligence (SB, Ministry of Internal Affairs) — the one attribution here that is documented","active":"first logged early 1960s (possibly late 1950s) – April 1998","status":"off-air","freqs":[8188,6507,5340],"schedule":["1800","2000","2100"],"intervalSignal":"A music box — cylinder and comb — on a tape loop","blurb":"A music box, then a voice everybody hears as 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 there was no girl. What everyone who has looked at it concludes is that the voice was generated — an automated voice circuit of the kind the East German services built, which is also why not one syllable of it ever varies. Nobody was in a room with a microphone. Something was switched on, and it read numbers into Western Europe for thirty years, and everybody who heard it heard a child.","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 292 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":5340,"signal":0.89,"drift":0.431,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"54434","bandPos":0.358,"readable":true,"band":"56 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":71219,"nextAtUTC":"1800","windowMin":25,"kind":"hours","wait":"19 h 46 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":0.678,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":215},{"id":"atencion","patch":"atencion.patch","designator":"V02a / HM01","name":"Atención","family":"voice","language":"Spanish","voice":"Woman, Spanish, fast and overmodulated","mode":"AM","site":"Near Havana, Cuba","attributed":"Dirección de Inteligencia — unconfirmed","active":"1960s – 2024","status":"off-air","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 off the air since its transmitter died in 2024.","listenFor":"The point where the voice stops. V02a became HM01: three minutes of headers read aloud, then twenty minutes of data — so nearly all of a late 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 was on the air in one form or another since the 1960s and it kept going until its transmitter failed in 2024.","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 been into an agent's apartment in 1995 and copied the decryption program off his computer, 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 got stranger before it stopped. V02a was replaced in 2012 by HM01, which reads six five-figure headers aloud for three minutes and then sends twenty minutes of data, so almost all of a late transmission is a texture rather than a voice. On 23 August 2024 the transmitter failed mid-changeover and has not come back; a few seconds of it leaked into a Radio Habana Cuba broadcast in early 2026, which is the only reason anybody thinks it might return."],"conditions":{"kHz":5883,"signal":0.278,"drift":0.729,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"23322","bandPos":0.418,"readable":true,"band":"51 m"},"airing":{"on":true,"endsInSec":1319,"nextInSec":0,"nextAtUTC":null,"windowMin":35,"kind":"hours","wait":"now","ends":"21 m 59 s","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":0.624,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":219},{"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 – 1 March 2011","status":"off-air","freqs":[9130,6840,5435,4270],"schedule":["on the hour and on the half 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 and holds it; most come up empty, as most of the real ones did. The odds are ours — nobody counted the real station's.","description":["E10 has no nickname, because it had nothing to name it after. From some time in the 1970s until the first of March 2011 it came up on schedule, said a three-letter identifier in an English voice, spelt out in NATO phonetics — 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. The odds are ours, not a measurement — nobody ever published how many of the real transmissions carried anything, only that most did not. 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":0.836,"drift":0.337,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44444","bandPos":0.219,"readable":true,"band":"70 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":2819,"nextAtUTC":"2300","windowMin":8,"kind":"hourly","wait":"46 m 59 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":0.624,"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 or woman, 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":0.74,"drift":0.36,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44444","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":0.274,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Channel marker","airtime":0.98,"patchLines":197},{"id":"the-buzzer","patch":"the-buzzer.patch","designator":"UVB-76 / S28","name":"The Buzzer","family":"marker","language":"Russian (rarely)","voice":"Man, Russian, reading a callsign and groups — rare before 2010, routine since","mode":"USB","site":"Povarovo, then near St Petersburg, now Naro-Fominsk (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, on 4625 kHz, since about 1990; before that its marker was a tone every couple of seconds. 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 so often — rarely before 2010, most days since — the buzzer stops and a voice reads a callsign and a string of Russian words and figures over the empty channel, and then the buzzing comes back as if nothing had happened. 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 narrow pulse filtered until it rasps, on for a second and a bit and off for a second, and that is the whole transmission — until, at a moment nothing predicts, the buzzer stops dead and a man reads a callsign and a group of Russian numerals over the empty channel. The callsign is a stand-in: the real ones are spelled in the Russian phonetic alphabet, and the synthesiser does not have it, so ours spells the monitors' name for the station in English letters, which the station itself never said."],"conditions":{"kHz":4625,"signal":0.9,"drift":0.355,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"54444","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":0.539,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Channel marker","airtime":0.98,"patchLines":367},{"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. 2000 – still on the air","status":"active","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":0.917,"drift":0.415,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"54534","bandPos":0.151,"readable":true,"band":"78 m"},"airing":{"on":true,"endsInSec":3035,"nextInSec":0,"nextAtUTC":null,"windowMin":null,"kind":"continuous","wait":"now","ends":"50 m 35 s","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":0.493,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Channel marker","airtime":0.98,"patchLines":208},{"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":"A long 1200 Hz tone and the call-up, ten minutes before the transmission. Then the call-up, repeated.","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-figure call-up over and over until somebody was supposed to have found it, then the message number and the group count, twice each, then the groups, every one read twice, and at the end \"00000\" and the call-up three times. It ran from at least the 1970s and versions of it are running now. Our reconstruction is looser — a four-figure call-up, groups read once, and \"konets\" where the zeroes belong — and that is ours, not his.","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 about sixty to the minute — a numeral every second or a little under — 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":0.952,"drift":0.373,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"54544","bandPos":0.269,"readable":true,"band":"65 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":67619,"nextAtUTC":"1700","windowMin":30,"kind":"hours","wait":"18 h 46 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":0.625,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":264},{"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 three-figure call-up, three times a line, for about four minutes.","blurb":"A call-up repeated for minutes, the groups, and then five zeroes, and off.","listenFor":"The ending. Five zeroes and off — the only courtesy in the entire format, and you know from the first one that it is over. The real station said them once; this reconstruction still says them twice.","description":["The English Man. A male English voice, catalogued E06, reading a three-figure call-up, three times a line, for about four minutes; then a three-figure group and the group count, twice each; then the groups, every one of them read twice; then the three-figure group and the count again; then \"zero zero zero zero zero\", once, and off. It has been logged since the 1970s and it is still logged now. Our reconstruction is looser than that — a five-figure call-up, \"message, message\", the groups read once, and the zeroes twice — and those are ours, not his.","The thing worth building around is the ending, because E06 has one and almost nothing else on shortwave does. Five zeroes, 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":0.797,"drift":0.325,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44444","bandPos":0.29,"readable":true,"band":"63 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":31619,"nextAtUTC":"0700","windowMin":30,"kind":"hours","wait":"8 h 46 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":0.218,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":205},{"id":"g06-german-lady","patch":"g06-german-lady.patch","designator":"G06","name":"The German Lady","family":"voice","language":"German","voice":"Automated female voice, German, running one notch under default speed","mode":"AM / USB","site":"Russia (by direction-finding)","attributed":"SVR — unconfirmed","active":"c. mid-1980s – 2021, with test transmissions since","status":"off-air","freqs":[6887,5934,4792],"schedule":["1300","1800","1930"],"intervalSignal":"None. A three-figure call-up, repeated for four minutes.","blurb":"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: an automated female voice reading German numerals, opening with a three-figure call-up repeated for four minutes, and then reading every message group TWICE. Once, a beat, then again. It ran from about the mid-1980s until 2021, latterly out of a transmitter hall near Smolensk, and by the end it was sending traffic that monitors believe was fake.","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 196 Hz, which is low and careful, and the rate is a fraction under natural. On the real station that was not a decision anybody made about German numerals: the voice was generated, set one notch below its default speed, and when the operators finished for the day they shut the PC down with its audio still patched into the transmitter, so the Windows shutdown chime went out over Europe after the numbers did."],"conditions":{"kHz":4792,"signal":0.569,"drift":0.245,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"34444","bandPos":0.291,"readable":true,"band":"63 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":74819,"nextAtUTC":"1900","windowMin":25,"kind":"hours","wait":"20 h 46 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":0.293,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":185},{"id":"e11-oblique","patch":"e11-oblique.patch","designator":"E11","name":"Oblique","family":"voice","language":"English","voice":"Woman, English with a Polish accent, recorded — played out from a PC since 2002","mode":"AM / USB","site":"Chotomów, near Warsaw (by TDoA and public site records)","attributed":"Polish military intelligence (Służba Wywiadu Wojskowego) — unconfirmed","active":"c. 1980s – present","status":"active","freqs":[5371,6849,8180,9079],"schedule":["1300","1605","1900"],"intervalSignal":"None. The identifier, repeated, for a little over three minutes — it was five and a half before 2008.","blurb":"Named after a punctuation mark, because she read the slash out loud.","listenFor":"The two figures after the oblique. Zero zero means nothing today, which is most days, and the whole thing ends on the word \"out\" a few minutes later. Ours flips a coin instead.","description":["The station is catalogued E11 and everybody calls it Oblique, because its call is a three-figure identifier, a slash and a two-figure number, and the woman reading it says the slash out loud. \"Three two one, oblique, three five.\" Over and over, for about three minutes. The second number is the count of groups to come — so \"oblique zero zero\", which is what it usually is, means there is nothing today, and the transmission ends on the word \"out\".","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, though the real station does not hide it: E11 says \"zero zero\" up front on the days it has nothing, which is most days. priyom has it sending traffic about once a month on each schedule, and nulls the rest of the time. A flip at the top of each cycle decides whether this one has a message, held for the whole transmission; the rest end on \"out\" where the message would have been. Ours does not yet give itself away the way the station did: it reads the same count after the oblique either way, where the real one said \"zero zero\" on a null."],"conditions":{"kHz":5371,"signal":0.794,"drift":0.399,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44434","bandPos":0.362,"readable":true,"band":"56 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":35219,"nextAtUTC":"0800","windowMin":20,"kind":"hours","wait":"9 h 46 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":0.301,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":249},{"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 — the call-up near 15 wpm, the traffic at 25 to 30.","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":0.711,"drift":0.376,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44434","bandPos":0.368,"readable":true,"band":"55 m"},"airing":{"on":true,"endsInSec":299,"nextInSec":0,"nextAtUTC":null,"windowMin":18,"kind":"hours","wait":"now","ends":"4 m 59 s","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":0.252,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Morse","airtime":0.46,"patchLines":159},{"id":"f01-magnetic-fields","patch":"f01-magnetic-fields.patch","designator":"E09","name":"Magnetic Fields","family":"voice","language":"English","voice":"Woman, English, live","mode":"AM / USB","site":"Unknown — monitors put it in North Africa","attributed":"Unattributed — monitors group it with the North African stations, on nothing firmer than its sister station in Arabic","active":"February 1995 – July 1997","status":"off-air","freqs":[11290,6645],"schedule":["0820","1800"],"intervalSignal":"Five minutes of a Jean-Michel Jarre record, at the top of the transmission and again at the end","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 station everybody calls Magnetic Fields, catalogued E09, because its interval signal was lifted off a Jean-Michel Jarre album. For five minutes before the figures a transmitter nobody ever placed — the monitoring community puts it somewhere in North Africa — played a sequencer riff that anybody in Europe could have hummed, and then a woman read five-figure groups in English, live, and the record played again at the end.","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 E09 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":6645,"signal":0.223,"drift":0.79,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"23222","bandPos":0.494,"readable":true,"band":"45 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":78419,"nextAtUTC":"2000","windowMin":30,"kind":"hours","wait":"21 h 46 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":0.634,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":158},{"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":"logged since at least the mid-1990s – still on the air","status":"active","freqs":[13974,11430,9276,8300],"schedule":["irregular"],"intervalSignal":"A few bars of Chinese flute, then a spoken station announcement","blurb":"The one that said its own name. A flute, an announcement, and then the figures.","listenFor":"The flute. A blown pipe carries its own breath as noise, and a shortwave path strips the top of the tone long before it touches the noise — so what arrives is mostly the breathing.","description":["The New Star Broadcasting Station, catalogued V13. A Taiwanese transmitter, broadcasting in Mandarin toward the mainland, opening and closing every transmission with a few bars of Chinese flute, announcing itself in between, and reading paired four-digit groups. Unlike almost everything else in this catalogue it did not pretend to be nothing: it said its own name. It is still doing it.","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 flute is the gesture, and the thing to get right about it is that it is a blown pipe and not a bell. Breath noise is not a defect of the tone, it is most of what identifies it, and the path is kinder to the noise than to the top of the pitch.","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":8300,"signal":0.063,"drift":0.866,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"13221","bandPos":0.632,"readable":false,"band":"36 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":6419,"nextAtUTC":"0000","windowMin":40,"kind":"hours","wait":"1 h 46 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":0.518,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":133},{"id":"v24-korean-station","patch":"v24-korean-station.patch","designator":"V15","name":"The Pyongyang Station","family":"voice","language":"Korean","voice":"Woman, Korean","mode":"AM","site":"Pyongyang","attributed":"North Korean intelligence — unconfirmed; framed on air as remote-university review assignments","active":"until 2000, back from June 2016, nothing logged since March 2020","status":"off-air","freqs":[6400,6250,3320],"schedule":["0000","1600"],"intervalSignal":"A few bars of melody in the pentatonic register Korean folk music uses","blurb":"The one that came back. Sixteen years of silence, then three years of lessons, and then silence again.","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 V15, and V24 in older lists: 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 June 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 — not five-figure groups this time but \"pages\" and \"numbers\", whole numbers read inside a spoken frame that calls them, says it will call them again, and does. It ran weekly until the summer of 2019 and was last heard in March 2020. Our reconstruction reads the older five-figure shape.","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.","V15 is what happens when a service decides the old way was better — not because it carries more, but because a lesson read aloud on the national broadcaster can be received on any radio in the country by somebody who owns nothing incriminating. It went out on shortwave, on six mediumwave channels, and from December 2016 on FM. 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":3320,"signal":0.769,"drift":0.46,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44434","bandPos":0.063,"readable":true,"band":"90 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":6419,"nextAtUTC":"0000","windowMin":45,"kind":"hours","wait":"1 h 46 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":0.627,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":158},{"id":"xpa-polish-numbers","patch":"xpa-polish-numbers.patch","designator":"XPA","name":"Polytone","family":"digital","language":"None — MFSK data","voice":"No voice. A two-tone preamble and a data burst.","mode":"USB — multi-tone MFSK, about 10 baud","site":"Moscow area, Russia (by direction-finding)","attributed":"SVR — unconfirmed","active":"2000s – still on the air","status":"active","freqs":[14972,13441,12157,10875],"schedule":["0710","0810","1310"],"intervalSignal":"A lead-in of tones running about two minutes, then a sync sequence, so a demodulator can lock on","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 — except that XPA still sends numbers, it just sends them as pitches. It opens with about two minutes of lead-in tones, syncs, gives a three-digit station identifier, and then steps through its groups on a fixed ladder of tones, about ten a second. No voice. Nothing a person could copy by ear. And then it does the whole thing again twenty minutes later, and again twenty minutes after that.","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 without needing a human being to keep up with it, and it does not have to be readable, only decodable. 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":14972,"signal":0.04,"drift":0.866,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"13221","bandPos":0.999,"readable":false,"band":"20 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":28019,"nextAtUTC":"0600","windowMin":12,"kind":"hours","wait":"7 h 46 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":0.648,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Digital","airtime":0.3,"patchLines":159},{"id":"xm-backwards-music","patch":"xm-backwards-music.patch","designator":"XM","name":"The Backwards Music Station","family":"unexplained","language":"None","voice":"No announcer. Voices do turn up in it, and they are the explanation rather than the mystery.","mode":"USB, logged as a sweeping tone","site":"Unknown","attributed":"Nobody. The monitoring consensus is that it was never a transmission at all.","active":"logged in 2004, and on and off since","status":"off-air","freqs":[10512,10363],"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. In May 2004 a signal turned up on 10512 kHz, and then on 10363, and stayed strong across Europe until the end of June, 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, and the same sound has turned up on other frequencies every so often since.","Then the monitoring community worked it out, and it is not a transmission at all. It is acoustic feedback: a transmitter keyed up with its microphone live, in the same room as a receiver tuned to it, the loop going round and round the way a PA system howls, put out over shortwave at whatever power the station happened to be running. You can reproduce it in a minute with a transceiver and a second radio. It explains the swells, it explains the sliding pitch, and it explains the voices — the voices are people in the room, walking past an open microphone that is broadcasting them to the world and back again. Earlier candidates are gone: LINCOMPEX was tested and dismissed in 2004, inverted sideband and jamming never fitted, and the US Navy circuits people pointed at, out of Jacksonville and Sigonella, were probably just particular rooms where it kept happening.","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, and it is the old explanation rather than the right one: 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":10512,"signal":0.04,"drift":0.91,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"13211","bandPos":0.779,"readable":false,"band":"29 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":8181,"nextAtUTC":"0029","windowMin":22,"kind":"sporadic","wait":"2 h 16 m","ends":null,"timetable":"no timetable; up for ~22 min, roughly every 9 h","hours":null},"own":0.194,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Unexplained","airtime":0.34,"patchLines":184},{"id":"n01-sector-report","patch":"n01-sector-report.patch","designator":"N01","name":"Sector Report","family":"voice","invented":true,"language":"English","voice":"Woman, English, clipped and level","mode":"USB","site":"Kerguelen Islands","attributed":"Nobody. Invented for 5x5.fm","active":"invented in 2026","status":"active","freqs":[6822,9217,12158,16404],"schedule":["0200","0900","1700"],"intervalSignal":"Two plain tones, high and low, four times.","blurb":"A woman reading a status report off a board: sector, quantity, what it is doing, and none of it about anything.","listenFor":"The grammar. Every line is a place, a figure, a quantity and what the quantity is doing, in the right order and with a breath after it, and the board is drawn fresh as she reads it, so no report is ever the same twice.","description":["A woman on upper sideband, somewhere far down the South Indian Ocean (the Kerguelen Islands, if the bearings are to be believed), reading a status report: two tones, \"attention, attention, status report\", then eight lines off a board. \"Sector four, pressure falling. Zone eleven, temperature stable. Sector two, depth nominal.\" Then \"end report\", a beat, \"out\", and the band. It was invented for this site, and nobody ever logged it.","The idea is vocabulary. Every other voice here reads figures, and a figure announces itself as code. This one reads words that belong together, in the order a duty operator would read them, one breath to a line. The grammar is perfect and the content is nothing: there is no sector four, and it has no pressure. What makes it unsettling is that it sounds exactly like something somebody somewhere needs to know.","The patch gives each slot in a line its own short list and draws from it as she speaks, so a place never lands where a state should and the board is never the same twice: thirty-six reports in half an hour, and no two alike. The words sit on a clock, with short gaps inside a line and a breath more than twice as long between lines, which is what makes it sound like somebody going down a list. She is pressed, steady and nearly flat, a trained voice reading off a board, and a long way away over a quiet part of the band."],"conditions":{"kHz":6822,"signal":0.202,"drift":0.794,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"23222","bandPos":0.51,"readable":false,"band":"44 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":13619,"nextAtUTC":"0200","windowMin":30,"kind":"hours","wait":"3 h 46 m","ends":null,"timetable":"0200 · 0900 · 1700 UTC, ~30 min each","hours":[0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0]},"own":0.464,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":221},{"id":"n02-the-round","patch":"n02-the-round.patch","designator":"N02","name":"The Round","family":"voice","invented":true,"language":"English","voice":"A man and a woman, English, reading the same figures","mode":"AM","site":"Terceira, Azores","attributed":"Nobody. Invented for 5x5.fm","active":"invented in 2026","status":"active","freqs":[5613,7866,10417],"schedule":["0600","1400","2100"],"intervalSignal":"None. The first seconds of unison are the nearest thing to one.","blurb":"Two readers, one list, and two clocks a hundredth apart.","listenFor":"Where they are in the round. They start as one voice with two throats, and within a minute or so she is a whole figure ahead; every minute or so after that the same slide happens one figure further on, until, a little over half an hour in, they are reading together again.","description":["N02, The Round. A man and a woman read the same twenty-five figures, five groups of five, in the same order, over and over, on one AM carrier that places itself on Terceira in the Azores, halfway between two continents. It was invented for this site and nobody ever logged it. They begin together, a single voice with two throats, and neither of them ever stops or waits for the other.","The idea is phase, the way Steve Reich built \"It's Gonna Rain\": two copies of one loop on two machines whose speeds are a hair apart. Nothing is ever told to change. The stutter, the echo, the alternation and the canon a whole figure apart are all what two nearly equal speeds do to each other if you leave them running. It is also why this is the one station in the catalogue that repeats itself on purpose. Everywhere else a group that comes round again is a mistake; here the two readers have to be saying the same list, or there is no phase to hear, only two people reading different figures at once.","The patch runs both readers off one fast clock, divided a hundred ways for him and ninety-nine for her, so she reads exactly one per cent faster at every pace and gains six hundred milliseconds a minute. Two separate clocks a beat per minute apart were tried first and drifted by different amounts at different speeds, because of how each one rounded. He is at 100 Hz and she at 214, not quite an octave above, so that when they say different figures at once their harmonics interleave rather than stack, and he is three decibels the louder. The full round back to unison takes between thirty-two and thirty-seven minutes, depending on pace, and each transmission starts them together again, because a transmitter coming up is a renderer starting from the top."],"conditions":{"kHz":5613,"signal":0.272,"drift":0.682,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"23322","bandPos":0.389,"readable":true,"band":"53 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":28019,"nextAtUTC":"0600","windowMin":40,"kind":"hours","wait":"7 h 46 m","ends":null,"timetable":"0600 · 1400 · 2100 UTC, ~40 min each","hours":[0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0]},"own":0.576,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":175},{"id":"n03-the-relay","patch":"n03-the-relay.patch","designator":"N03","name":"The Relay","family":"voice","invented":true,"language":"Russian and English","voice":"Man, Russian (the call); woman, English (the answer)","mode":"USB","site":"Longyearbyen, Svalbard (the call); the answer from much further away","attributed":"Nobody. Invented for 5x5.fm","active":"invented in 2026","status":"active","freqs":[4492,6970,8198,11302],"schedule":["0000","0400","1100","1900"],"intervalSignal":"None. The far station's carrier whistle comes up before each answer.","blurb":"A strong Russian station reads five figures, and a faint English one, a continent away, reads them back.","listenFor":"The readback. Whatever he says, she says a few seconds later, fainter, narrower and with her own whistle. Now and then she gets a figure wrong, and he says \"povtoryayu\" and reads the group again.","description":["Somewhere very far north, near enough Longyearbyen, a strong transmitter reads a group of five figures in Russian and stops. A few seconds later a much weaker station reads the same five figures back in English, a woman's voice arriving thin and hollow from much further away. Then the north reads the next group. When she gets one wrong he says \"povtoryayu\" and sends the group again. It is a station nobody ever logged, because it was invented for this site, but it keeps a schedule like the others.","It is built around the answer. Every other voice station here is one-way: a transmitter reads into the dark and nothing on the frequency admits anyone heard it. This one is a circuit, and the readback is the proof of delivery that a one-way station can never have. You are not overhearing a broadcast. You are overhearing somebody check, group by group, that the far end has it. Neither voice is the interesting part. The interesting part is that the second one says what the first one said.","In the patch the figures belong to neither voice. They are drawn once into five sample-and-holds, and both readers take their figures from the same five, so the readback cannot disagree with the call except when it is meant to. A small chance on each figure makes her say nine minus the right one. The caller remembers it, says \"povtoryayu\", and the holds keep the same group for the next exchange. Her path is everything his is not: a narrower passband, a 4.2 ms echo of herself, fading of her own, and a heterodyne whistle that exists only while her carrier is up. Measured, she leaves the aerial 14 dB below him and arrives about 10 dB below."],"conditions":{"kHz":4492,"signal":0.819,"drift":0.325,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44444","bandPos":0.251,"readable":true,"band":"67 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":6419,"nextAtUTC":"0000","windowMin":25,"kind":"hours","wait":"1 h 46 m","ends":null,"timetable":"0000 · 0400 · 1100 · 1900 UTC, ~25 min each","hours":[1,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0]},"own":0.66,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":310},{"id":"n04-the-whisperer","patch":"n04-the-whisperer.patch","designator":"N04","name":"The Whisperer","family":"voice","invented":true,"language":"English","voice":"Woman, whispering, letter names","mode":"AM","site":"Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego","attributed":"Nobody. Invented for 5x5.fm","active":"invented in 2026","status":"active","freqs":[3317,4843,6209],"schedule":["0100","0300","2300"],"intervalSignal":"None. A deeper breath opens each group.","blurb":"A woman whispering five-letter groups close to the microphone, a breath before every letter, and long stretches of empty band between them.","listenFor":"The breath. A whisper has no pitch, so nothing in it stands out of the noise the way a voice does; she is made of the same stuff as the band, and the only thing that tells the two apart is where her mouth puts the resonances.","description":["N04, The Whisperer. A woman, very close to the microphone, whispering the names of letters — ay, bee, see, not alfa, bravo, charlie — five to a group, one to a breath, with a long stretch of empty band between groups. It is notionally sent from Ushuaia, at the bottom of Tierra del Fuego, though this station was invented for this site and nobody has ever logged it.","Every other voice in this catalogue is a pitch: a buzz from the vocal folds with a fundamental and a ladder of harmonics standing up out of the noise, which is what lets the ear follow it through hiss. A whisper has none of that. It is noise shaped by a mouth arriving through noise shaped by an ionosphere, and the only difference between the two is where the mouth puts its resonances. So she does not fade into the floor; she sits on it, and you have to lean in.","The patch whispers in the plainest sense: the synthesiser's vocal folds are held apart, so every word keeps its length and its shape and loses its pitch. The letters are drawn one at a time as she says them. The breath before each letter is a separate sound, and the first of every group is deeper. The band is turned down so that a station this quiet is still the thing on the frequency. Through the receiver, the letters stand about eight decibels over the empty band between groups, and more than half of what survives sits between one and three kilohertz, the region that tells one consonant from another. The pace control only moves her between slow and slower: a letter every two and a half seconds at one end and every second and a half at the other."],"conditions":{"kHz":4843,"signal":0.859,"drift":0.352,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"44444","bandPos":0.298,"readable":true,"band":"62 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":2819,"nextAtUTC":"2300","windowMin":20,"kind":"hours","wait":"46 m 59 s","ends":null,"timetable":"0100 · 0300 · 2300 UTC, ~20 min each","hours":[0,1,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1]},"own":0.574,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Voice","airtime":0.38,"patchLines":143},{"id":"n05-the-heartbeat","patch":"n05-the-heartbeat.patch","designator":"N05","name":"The Heartbeat","family":"marker","invented":true,"language":"English","voice":"Man, English, flat","mode":"AM","site":"Adak, Aleutian Islands","attributed":"Nobody. Invented for 5x5.fm","active":"invented in 2026","status":"active","freqs":[4617,5822],"schedule":["continuous"],"intervalSignal":"A heartbeat — lub, and a softer dub.","blurb":"A double thump at fifty-eight to the minute, which quickens for twenty seconds, stops, and lets a man read five figures.","listenFor":"The quickening. The heartbeat always climbs for about twenty seconds before it stops, so after the first time you know the voice is coming before it does.","description":["A channel marker on the edge of the Bering Sea, notionally from Adak in the Aleutians — a station invented for this site, which nobody ever logged. A low double thump, the second beat softer than the first, fifty-eight to the minute, day and night. Now and then it gets faster, and faster again, and then it stops, and a man reads five figures in English over the empty channel. Then the heart comes back, still racing, and takes most of a minute to settle.","It is a marker like the Pip and the Buzzer, and makes the same point: a frequency held open by something that says nothing. What it adds is warning. The Pip and the Buzzer stop without notice, and you only know an interruption has started once it has. This one tells you when. For twenty seconds before the voice the marker is itself the signal, climbing from fifty-eight to about a hundred and twenty, and anyone who has heard it once learns to hear it quicken and to wait.","The patch drives the heartbeat's clock from a slewed level, so the rate climbs and relaxes continuously and never steps. It climbs over twenty seconds, holds through the silence and falls away over forty-five. The thump is a sine that drops in pitch, pitched between 380 and 470 Hz so that it survives a receiver's 300 Hz cut, where a real heart's 60 Hz would not. The count comes from a random click stream with only every fourth click let through: about two minutes apart on average, never on a timetable, and it never stops without quickening first."],"conditions":{"kHz":5822,"signal":0.406,"drift":0.569,"daylight":0.466,"muf":18.969,"sinpo":"34333","bandPos":0.412,"readable":true,"band":"51 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":0.28,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Channel marker","airtime":0.98,"patchLines":230},{"id":"n06-the-fist","patch":"n06-the-fist.patch","designator":"N06","name":"The Fist","family":"morse","invented":true,"language":"None — International Morse","voice":"None — hand-keyed CW, twenty words a minute falling to sixteen.","mode":"CW","site":"Tórshavn, Faroe Islands","attributed":"Nobody. Invented for 5x5.fm","active":"invented in 2026","status":"active","freqs":[6391,8032,10745],"schedule":["0500","1000","1500","2000"],"intervalSignal":"None. He starts sending.","blurb":"Morse figures sent by hand, badly, from the far north. You can hear the man getting tired.","listenFor":"The spacing. Nothing lands on a grid: the dahs run long, the gaps are never the same twice, and over twenty minutes the whole thing slows by a quarter. Now and then a run of eight dits, and the last group again.","description":["N06 sent five-figure groups in Morse, by hand, on a transmitter somewhere around Tórshavn that chirped on every key-down and leaked a faint carrier between them — or would have, had it existed: the station was invented for this site, and nobody ever logged it. No call-up worth the name, no voice, no interval signal: one man, one straight key, and groups for as long as the shift lasted.","It is built around a fist — the radio operator's word for somebody's way of sending, as individual as handwriting and used as handwriting: a listener who had copied one operator for a week could tell you when somebody else had sat down in his chair. M12, elsewhere in this catalogue, is a machine, every element on a grid forever. This is the other thing. His dahs are a little long and the length wanders; his spaces are never quite the same twice; he starts near twenty words a minute and is sending sixteen by the end. And now and then he gets one wrong, sends eight dits, and sends the whole group again.","The patch builds the Morse itself: the ten figures are the ten five-element windows onto one ring of five dits and five dahs, so a figure is a number from a shift register and a pair of comparators. The key is a single clock whose speed is reset for every interval — dit, dah, or space — and multiplied by a slow ramp of tiredness, a slow drift, and a fresh random draw thirteen times a second. The error sign is eight dits, and the resend is the same five figures because the shift register is wound back round to where the group started. The tone chirps about 23 Hz on every key-down and settles in fifty milliseconds, which is the cheap transmitter."],"conditions":{"kHz":6391,"signal":0.239,"drift":0.766,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"23322","bandPos":0.47,"readable":true,"band":"47 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":24419,"nextAtUTC":"0500","windowMin":20,"kind":"hours","wait":"6 h 46 m","ends":null,"timetable":"0500 · 1000 · 1500 · 2000 UTC, ~20 min each","hours":[0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0]},"own":0.603,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Morse","airtime":0.46,"patchLines":325},{"id":"n07-the-forgetting-song","patch":"n07-the-forgetting-song.patch","designator":"N07","name":"The Forgetting Song","family":"unexplained","invented":true,"language":"None","voice":"None","mode":"AM","site":"Rapa Nui","attributed":"Nobody. Invented for 5x5.fm","active":"invented in 2026","status":"active","freqs":[7412,9973,13580],"schedule":["irregular"],"intervalSignal":"Eight notes on a zither, repeated, with no message after them.","blurb":"A short tune on plucked strings, played over and over, forgetting a note of itself every minute or so.","listenFor":"The note that is not where it was last time. Stay five minutes and two or three of the eight will have moved; stay an hour and, now and then, they all come back.","description":["N07 plays eight notes on something like a zither: a short phrase that climbs, falls and comes to rest, every three and a half seconds, without a break. Direction-finding would put it in the empty middle of the South Pacific, near Rapa Nui, and there is no record of anybody finding it, because it was invented for this site and nobody ever logged it. On any other station this would be the interval signal, the part that plays while you wait for the message. On this one the message never comes, and the tune does not stay the same.","The station is built around memory. Each time the phrase comes round, any of its notes may be forgotten and replaced with another from the same mode, and a forgotten note may just as easily be remembered again. Over half an hour the tune drifts from itself a note at a time, and every so often it wanders back. The rhythm, the mode and the instrument never change, so the only thing that does is which notes it has lost. If the station is saying anything, that is how it says it.","In the patch every note has its own pair of coins, tossed once a round: one decides whether anything happens to that note, the other whether it is forgotten or remembered. A shift register would have been the obvious tool, but flipping one bit of it moves several notes at once, and the aim was a tune that loses a single note, not one that turns into another tune. In a two-hour render the first note goes after forty-seven seconds, three of the eight have moved at five minutes, and at an hour the tune came all the way back to itself for a minute before starting to go again."],"conditions":{"kHz":7412,"signal":0.143,"drift":0.817,"daylight":0,"muf":5.5,"sinpo":"23222","bandPos":0.562,"readable":false,"band":"40 m"},"airing":{"on":false,"endsInSec":0,"nextInSec":16929,"nextAtUTC":"0255","windowMin":30,"kind":"sporadic","wait":"4 h 42 m","ends":null,"timetable":"no timetable; up for ~30 min, roughly every 7 h","hours":null},"own":0.59,"onAir":false,"listeners":0,"transmitting":null,"familyLabel":"Unexplained","airtime":0.34,"patchLines":307}]}