The Lincolnshire Poacher
I caught the tail-end of a facinating programme this morning about number stations, which broadcast encrypted messages on short-wave all around the world. The broadcasts begin with some sort of signature, like a series of notes on a xylophone, and consist of a recorded human voice slowly reading a list of single digit numbers in groups of five, sounding somewhat like the recorded voice you get when dialling 1471 from your home phone.
Some are scheduled, some are not, some are in morse code. Starting somewhere around the middle of the cold war, these stations started broadcasting on the edge of the frequency spectrum, and rather curiously, are still broadcasting today.
Simon Mason featured on the programme maintains a website on the subject. He also has a copy of the programme available in WMA format.
And the Lincolnshire Poacher? Well nobody really knows. The lincolnshire poacher appears to broadcast from somewhere in Cyprus, but nothing is known about who it really is or what is messages mean.
The programme is here at the BBC if you want to hear it in its entirety.
All of the recordings on it come from The Conet Project, which is the 80 page book and quadruple CD that has sparked off all the interest in Numbers Stations, taking the subject out of the obscurity of biffins and thrusing it into the public arena.
Its a subject that captivates pretty much everyone that encounters it - this is quite a good programme as an introduction to it all.
Comment by David Hemmingway — April 23, 2005 @ 3:32 pm