In the shadowy corners of the shortwave radio spectrum, you can often find mysterious mechanical voices counting off endless strings of numbers — in English, Czech, Russian and German … even Morse code. But who’s listening? The voices are coming from what are known as “number stations” and they’ve long been thought to be part of international espionage operations.
Number Stations: Are mysterious shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin believed to be operated by government agencies to communicate with spies “in the field”.
Many historians speculate that number stations have been used as early as the first world war, if this is true this would make them one of the earliest forms of radio broadcasting. There are many theories behind the purpose of number stations. One theory speculate that they are used by drug smugglers. However, the only theory that has gained some support is that numbers stations are used to communicate with spies. The US government has accused Cuba of using a well known number station called “Atencion” to communicate with spies in the US, they have found on one of the spied computers a decryption program thought to be used to decipher the messages originating from the number station.
UVB-76 is a famous call sign originating from a number station in Russia, The purpose of this signal is still a mystery.
The Conet Project:
It is a four-CD set of recordings of numbers stations. The collection was released by England’s Irdial-Discs record label in 1997, based on the work of numbers station enthusiast Akin Fernandez.
The collection can be found here.
It was also uploaded to soundcloud and the whole CD is available for free at IrDial website here. If you would like to download the whole 4-cd set, you can download it from here.
Active and Nonactive Number Stations:
This site shows the locations of number stations on the map. Also you can find some information about the currently active and non active number stations.
I first heard about it from a Fringe episode about this where people listening to the numbers would get their brain fried. The excerpt can be seen here:
https://youtu.be/H6K948YNtY4
Also BBC radio has made a cool, half-hour long show about them, the recording can be downloaded here.
Personally I somehow want to believe that this originated first from Russia, because those soviet bastards had the minds and the technology ahead of their time.
Sources:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128586766
http://www.damninteresting.com/number-stations/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conet_Project
Further Reading:
The Russian Woodpecker, a similar shortwave signal – now inactive.
http://www.simonmason.karoo.net/page30.html