Anyone into Shortwave? Number Stations?

[IndyXJ]

With the news in Egypt and their government shutting down communications such as the Internet and I'm sure telephony, I was thinking of shortwave. I never got into the hobby, but was always fascinated by it. Bored, I just dug into some things and found some cool web based receivers where you can tune it to where you want,etc.
Also, during this websurfing, I found articles and videos/soundfiles about Numbers Stations that apparently have been around a while. Pretty interesting stuff. Here is the links I found without me trying to explain it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nERNpV7bMQ
http://www.websdr.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1nVbRjDBUw&feature=related

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station
http://www.irdial.com/conet.htm

http://uvb-76.blogspot.com/

Anyway, I'm sure there are a few hobbyists on here since we have other hobbies besides Jeeps right? lol.:tv:

 

[casm]

Also check out:

http://www.spynumbers.com/
http://www.clandestineradio.com/
http://www.apul64.dsl.pipex.com/enigma2000/
http://home.luna.nl/~ary/
http://www.hfunderground.com/
http://www.simonmason.karoo.net/page30.html
http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/spooks
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg12797.html

You may also want to look into shortwave pirates - numbers stations get repetitive pretty quickly:

http://www.archive.org/details/ShortwavePirateRadio
http://erick_cartman.home.mchsi.com/PirateSSTV.htm
https://sites.google.com/site/napiratehof/
http://www.piratesweek.info/
http://shortwavepirate.info/wordpress/
http://www.frn.net/

I'm just pulling these out of my bookmarks without checking if they're still valid or not, so there may well be some dead links in there.

 

[IndyXJ]

Thanks Casm for all the links. I haven't seen most of those. For fun, I picked up a $50 Grundig just to fiddle with. Perhaps someday I'll have a dedicated base rig. I *did* hear a Spanish speaking number station the other night. I can't believe that little G8 picked it up.

 

[casm]

Thanks Casm for all the links. I haven't seen most of those. For fun, I picked up a $50 Grundig just to fiddle with. Perhaps someday I'll have a dedicated base rig. I *did* hear a Spanish speaking number station the other night. I can't believe that little G8 picked it up.

No worries; glad it helped. FWIW, chances are that the station you picked up was V2 - I can get this one pretty easily where I am as well.

What model Grundig did you pick up?

 

[IndyXJ]

Grundig G8 World Traveller II $50

http://www.professionalequipment.co...w-shortwave-radio-w-ats-g8/short-wave-radios/

Dayton Hamfest is in May. Maybe I'll check it out. I went ages ago in the 90's.

 

[kastein]

Don't really do shortwave at the moment, though I'm an Extra class amateur op... soon as I get my radios set back up at the house (figure end of summer or so) I should be on the air.

Talked to a guy in Cuba running 5 watts of power on 40 meter a few years ago. It's pretty amazing what kind of range you can get when band conditions are good.

 

[casm]

Grundig G8 World Traveller II $50

http://www.professionalequipment.co...w-shortwave-radio-w-ats-g8/short-wave-radios/

That's not a bad little radio at all; had one a few years back. I'd recommend picking one up that can do SSB and direct frequency entry if you really get into DXing; there's a huge amount of stuff out there not broadcasting in straight AM (or FM, for that matter).

Dayton Hamfest is in May. Maybe I'll check it out. I went ages ago in the 90's.

Been debating that myself; there's some radio gear I'd like to pick up if possible, and we're short on swap meets around here.

 

[IndyXJ]

Yeah, my research keeps mentioning SSB. What does it mean in laymen's terms? Is it a certain freq range?

 

[kastein]

SSB is single sideband. It's a modulation type.

When you modulate the carrier frequency (what you tune your dial to, for instance 99.5MHz for one of the FM broadcast stations) with another signal (say, audio) you get two new signals, the "sum" and "difference" signals. These are called sidebands. In AM both the sum and difference signals are transmitted along with a strong carrier signal right at the center. In "single sideband" only one or the other sideband (the sum signal is the upper sideband, the difference signal is the lower sideband) is transmitted, with no carrier, which results in being able to put more energy into transmitting the signal and less into wasted energy without going above the transmitter's government-licensed power output limit.

 

[casm]

SSB is single sideband. It's a modulation type.

Just to expand on Kastein's reply a little, since you'll run across the terminology rather frequently: if you dig through the loggings of numbers stations on the Spooks List archives (for example), you'll see reports that look like the following:

    Freq ENIGMA Day   MMDDYYYY  UTC  Mode Comments     
-------- ------ --- ---------- ---- ----- --------------------     
    5070    S06 Tue   02012011 15:00   USB ID: 537; 924, Grps 6; First group: 51269; strong signal, but also loud buzzer-type interference

'Freq' is pretty much self-explanatory. If you look under 'Mode', it's 'USB' for Upper Side Band; not surprisingly, 'LSB' is used for Lower Side Band. Other common types are AM, FM, digital tones, and CW (Carrier Wave, typically meaning Morse Code); there are others, but those are the usual ones.

The 'ENIGMA' column refers to the reference number assigned to the station by contributors to the ENIGMA group. Because a good chunk of these stations have been broadcasting for years, most of them have been assigned references in order to better identify ongoing broadcasts from new ones; the current reference list is here (PDF format). As an example, if the Spanish-language station you heard the other night started its broadcast with, "¡Atencion! ¡Atencion!," it was likely V02 or one of its variants, a well-known Cuban station with a propensity for occasionally unintentionally mixing Radio Havana's audio into its transmission.

The 'Day' and 'Time' fields are based off of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), Zulu, or Greenwich Mean Time - pick a name, but they're all (in this context) essentially interchangeable. The reason for standardising on UTC is simple: it means that everyone following this stuff only has to convert from UTC to the timezone that they're receiving in, rather than figuring out where they are in relation to, say, someone reporting from Moscow (UTC+8). For this reason, it's generally frowned-upon to submit reports in time zones other than UTC; even using something like 'UTC-5' to denote the Eastern timezone isn't acceptable.

Have a look at http://www.brogers.dsl.pipex.com/enigma2000/docs/faq.pdf - it gives a better overview of a lot of this than we've got space to go into here. The ENIGMA website is a really good starting point on numbers stations in general, but they love the PDF format.