I had come across a Movie titled “The Numbers Station” starring John Cusack. While not a Blockbuster, it was entertaining, and is certainly worth watching.
I became curious about these Stations, so did a little reading up, and found there to be an active Hobby grown up around this piece of the Cold war, finding, and posting about left over as yet active Numbers Stations.
There is a Website dedicated to this hobby, Priyom.org Here people who have located the frequencies, and learned the schedules of the Broadcasts post their findings on Priyom, and the site posts a schedule, and provides links to another Site, websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ located in the Netherlands that provides free anytime access to all of the Shortwave spectrum. So if you were to get onto Priyom, and click the “Next Station” link just before it is due to transmit, you will be able to hear whatever it is they have to say that day.
All major, and some lesser Nations utilize these Stations and in many languages. They may be spoken by person, or computerized speech, or Morse code, or some other manner of encryption. No reasonable hope to decrypt anything you might hear, but you will hear it. It’s not very exciting, but it is interesting , so I recommend giving a listen sometime.
One of the better known, tho practically boring, is UVB76, located in the old soviet Union, and referred to as the “Buzzer” as that is about all it does. Occasionally, really not often there may be message broadcasting in Russian, but I’ve only heard recordings of a couple.
Anyway, if this is of interest to anyone, check out the Sites mentioned, and you may hear something.
