[FARC] interesting article

[Bob Moroney]

Interested folks can Google "numbers stations" and get plenty of info to 
chew on, some of it valid, some not. 

The inevitable Wikipedia article should show up at the top of the search 
results.  It's a good place to start since it seems to have a much 
higher fact to speculation ratio compared to some of the other sites 
that discuss numbers stations. 

Use of HF CW by many of these stations makes sense since it doesn't 
require anything other than a pencil and paper to copy, it's more likely 
than AM modes to be fully readable under bad propagation conditions, and 
unless you can DF the emitter, it doesn't convey any particular national 
identification. 
  
It's a safe bet that the U.S. operates numbers stations 24/7 for various 
purposes.  Who knows - one of them could be sending instructions to our 
spies in Cuba!  ;-)

73, Bob K9CMR
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Joseph M. Durnal wrote:
> Interesting content but the article quality wasn't that great.  I've been
> following this.
>
> Have you ever heard a "numbers" station?  I have.  Numbers stations send
> seemingly random numbers via CW on HF.  They are often 5 number groups, but
> I've heard the number groups as large as 8 before.
>
> I have a whole page of 5 number groups that I copied near the top of 40
> meters one morning (a strange place to hear code). They are good code
> practice, because a lot of the numbers stations I've heard were slower,
> machine sent CW.
>
> So why doesn't the government do anything about it?  Well, there isn't much
> they can do, in fact, I wouldn't rule out that the US government doesn't
> send messages this way.  The numbers are likely an encrypted message using a
> one time pad cipher.  Unless you have the answer key, they are just random
> numbers.  Yes, cryptography is one of my other hobbies, one that is
> completely incompatible with ham radio!
>
> 73 de Joseph Durnal NE3R
>
> On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 8:49 AM, Anthony C <n1ig at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/18/cuban-spies-shortwave-radios-defy-detection/
>
> _________________________________________________________________
>