If you’ve never had a chance to play around with a shortwave radio, I encourage you to do so. They’re a lot of fun. I wish I had one when I was young. I think I would have found it to be of great comfort.
Every time I’ve had the chance to explore the world of shortwave radio, it has always felt like such an intimate experience to me. It’s as if whoever is talking is doing so directly to me. I can imagine that that person is also sitting alone in a room, reaching out from the other side of the world. “Hello. I know you’re out there, somewhere. Let me tell you a secret.”
The internet has reduced the number of people who listen to shortwave, but it hasn’t managed to kill the format off entirely. There are stations out there still. You can get a taste of a few of them from this article, entitled, Can you listen to shortwave radio online? The basics. About halfway down the article are links to stations that also stream on the internet. You can hear what’s being broadcast from Australia to France to Russia to Sweden. It’s good to listen to different perspectives. But these stations are by no means the only ones you can hear on a shortwave radio. The possibilities are endless.
People listen to shortwaves for a variety of reasons. Some people like to hear international news from the actual source. Some listeners are expats longing for news from home. Others live in heavily censored totalitarian countries and can’t get the news any other way. Unfortunately, it’s also a great way to transmit propaganda. In times of war, shortwave can sometimes be the only way to receive information of any kind.
People living in extremely remote areas, who have no hope of ever getting internet or phone signals, often rely on shortwave as their only source of news, entertainment and/or educational programs. Even in densely populated areas, these radios keep people connected after natural disasters because they function even in times when cell towers are destroyed.
There are also many utility channels on shortwave. The system is used for maritime, naval, aviation and military signals, as well as amateur radio stations. But by far my favorite type of utility station on shortwave is the numbers station. The first time you hear one, it is guaranteed to creep you out.
I first stumbled across one at the extreme end of my radio’s band, late on a cold winter’s night. It was a woman’s voice, calmly and emotionlessly reading random numbers. Her transmission was preceded and succeeded by a series of tones, the same note repeated over and over. It kind of made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, but at the same time, I couldn’t stop listening.
You can find numbers stations in many different languages and accents. Mostly, the speakers seem to be women, but occasionally they are men, or even children. The transmissions by children are particularly creepy. I’ve always assumed that the people speaking have no idea what the messages they are sending mean, either.
Some of these messages include Morse code, some include musical tones or gongs or beeps. Back when I listened to them, all of the voices seemed to be actual people. From what I’m reading now, though, a lot of them are automated these days. I’m sure that increases accuracy, and that is probably very important, but it takes all the fun out of it.
If you dig deep enough into the lunatic fringe conspiracy theory part of the internet, I’m sure you can find all sorts of explanations for these stations, but it’s generally assumed that they are a way to communicate with spies. It makes perfect sense, because you could never trace the listener. If the listener had a series of codes on what is called a “one-time pad” they’d be able to decode the message and dispose of the key by flushing it or swallowing it. And the code could change with every message, rendering those missives all but unbreakable.
According to an article entitled The spooky world of the ‘numbers stations’, no government or intelligence agency has ever admitted or denied that they use these stations. It is quite notable, however, that the number of these transmissions has gone way down since the end of the cold war. I wonder if there have been upticks again during subsequent wars.
The thought of numbers stations makes me nostalgic. (So much so that I just bought myself a shortwave on Amazon.) Numbers stations saw me through a very rough period of my life.
I worked the graveyard shift for 14 years, mainly because I hated my life at the time and wanted to sleep through as much of it as I possibly could. Occasionally, I’d bring the shortwave to work, and I’d sit on my drawbridge in the dark, looking at the city skyline while everyone slept. I’d listen to a woman recite numbers and wonder what she was thinking.
She was probably sitting in a tiny little shack, too. I liked to think she was by herself, too, rather than having some superior breathing down her neck. I would never know what she was saying, and neither would she, but at the very least, she told me that I wasn’t alone, and I wasn’t the only woman in the world with a non-traditional job. Back then, I needed to know that. I really did.
That “spooky” article mentioned above said that there is a 5 CD set of recordings of these numbers stations called the Conet Project, and I found out that you can listen to them for free on YouTube. The first disc is here. I’ve been listening to it as I write this. It’s like coming home to a place I could never really understand. It makes me smile.
Due to the disturbing efficiency of Amazon, I’ll most likely have my shortwave by the time you read this. Who knows? I might be listening to a numbers station right now. I’ll never tell.
But I will tell you this, Dear Reader. Given the current climate here in America, it might not be a bad idea to get yourself a shortwave radio. The day may come when you want to break through the wall of governmental misinformation and learn what is really going on from an outside source, or perhaps hop over to the utility channels to listen to what ICE agents or the military or national guard in your area are chattering about amongst themselves. Just sayin’.
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