A neat bit of clandestine operations history and something that’s still very, very relevant. Patriotman did a write up some time back regarding how they work and I teach an in-depth module on it in the Advanced RTO Course, along with using Trigrams to add a second layer of encryption making the code truly unbreakable.
A Neat Look At The History And Practice Of Numbers Stations

For years, I heard about The Russian Woodpecker transmitter and how it annoyed Hams. A couple years ago, this German nuclear student went into Pripyat and visited the site of the transmitter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l_4fzJv_i0 Bionerd climbs the actual antenna.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-UXWh4Rj_E Bionerd sneaks into the control building for the antenna.
I remember that. You can still hear it. It’s most likely a propagation beacon for the Russian HF nets since they have such a large land mass spreading over many, many timezones.
IIRC, Wasn’t that an OTH radar?
That was the ‘common knowledge’ thinking, but this was incorrect. It was a propagation beacon that could be reverted to a voice net in case of nuclear attack. There was an incident where voices were actually heard on it.
Grateful to have learned about this in RTO Advanced class. Nice video. Not sure what’s funny about it JP.
I’m not eating anything a random person hands me on a mission.
Especially considering that most of these stations are in Red controlled territory.
I’d like to get a shortwave and tune into some of these.
Lmao.
Here, take this secret message. And when you are done chew on this Cyanide errr… I mean regular, perfectly normal Chewing Gum immediately.