> Fernandez, who more than two decades ago published a four-CD audio compendium of hundreds of recordings from around the world called the Conet Project. It's considered the Bible for numbers-station enthusiasts.
The Conet Project is an interesting listen -- very analogue, Cold War-ish, and a bit sinister. Seems to be available on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/The-Conet-Project
Fans of the band Wilco will recognize one of the Conet Project's recordings as the source of the woman repeating "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" in the song "Poor Places" from the eponymous album. Wilco failed to license the sample and the resulting lawsuit gave the Conet Project a portion of Wilco's royalties on that track.
Why would they need to license the sample? You don't own the copyright for something just because you recorded it off the radio, that's silly. I looked it up and the station in question was operated by the Israeli government, so presumably they would be due the royalties. https://priyom.org/number-stations/english/e10
This reminds me of Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel, which established that copying someone's photograph of a public domain painting is not a copyright violation, as the photograph is not copyrightable under US law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel....
The location of this transmitter is a shortwave transmission facility within a US military base in Böblingen, 15 km southwest of Stuttgart, Germany. The coordinates:
I wonder why they keep using a dedicated numbers station instead of embedding the code in a regular radio broadcast on a traditional channel? I'm sure that even before LLMs one could find a way to create a story where certain numbers / code words would be embedded without altering the underlying story too much. And they could probably get BBC / whatever station to air it. It would be a bit less inconspicuous to listen to BBC than to a dedicated numbers station, even if the message would be undecryptable either way.
This reminds me of UVB-76[0], a shortwave military radio in Russia. It would be interesting know why they're using this method to communicate covertly rather than beaming down messages to a phone via satellite or something. I'm not an expert on radios, though, so maybe it's not as clunky as I'm imagining where an undercover asset is hauling around bulky equipment.
So one slightly fascinating bit of number station / espionage radio lore is "RAFTER" an MI5 scheme cooked up by Peter Wright to detect the _receiver_ of the radio using emissions from the internals of the radio set (superhet mixing iirc)
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> Fernandez, who more than two decades ago published a four-CD audio compendium of hundreds of recordings from around the world called the Conet Project. It's considered the Bible for numbers-station enthusiasts.
The Conet Project is an interesting listen -- very analogue, Cold War-ish, and a bit sinister. Seems to be available on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/The-Conet-Project
This reminds me of Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel, which established that copying someone's photograph of a public domain painting is not a copyright violation, as the photograph is not copyrightable under US law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel....
48°41'26"N 9°05'12"E
https://www.google.com/maps/place/48%C2%B041'26.0%22N+9%C2%B...
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_RAFTER