April 16th General Meeting – Will be at the HUB

Our next scheduled meeting will be April 16 at 1:00 PM at the HUB. Mike Langner (K5MGR) will give his “Burn After Reading” talk at the meeting. Below is the description for that  presentatio0n.

Technical Meeting Description

The presentation might well be titled “Burn After Reading,” since it covers secret messages via shortwave radio both within and outside our HF Amateur Radio bands from the time of the Second World War to the present – in fact, the most recent recording of clandestine numbers transmission is one I made just a few weeks ago. A small sample of it is attached for your interest, as is a short clip of the British “Lincolnshire Poacher,” so named because the “sig” sound that prefaces the numbers is the first two bars of the English popular folk tune The Lincolnshire Poacher.The numbers’ codes used one-time code book pages for decoding the messages which were destroyed after one use, hence the “Burn After Reading” appellation is perfectly placed !

When Korean Air Lines Flight 858 was bombed out of the air killing 115 passengers and crew the instructions to bomb it were placed via clandestine numbers station to North Korean agents Kim Sung-Il and Kim Hyon-hui.

The British operated a world-wide numbers station, The Lincolnshire Poacher. The United States even operated (and still does operate) numbers stations, although a bit less clandestinely, since we even use call letters!

And the Cuban “Wasp Network” and long-time CIA employee (and Cuban spy) Ana Montes got her instructions from Havana via numbers stations for some 20 years before she was caught.

And all of us who’ve used HF Amateur Radio for years have heard “The Buzzer,” Soviet (Russian) UVB more times than we’d like to have heard it!

And, of course, we’ll touch very briefly on the clandestine “Yosemite Sam” DF adventure that WA5OIP (SK) and I undertook for the FCC some years ago, successfully driving right up to in on Indian land near Mesita, NM.

Plus, Albuquerque actually had a numbers station. Many of us heard it during the early Caravan Club years when we were on 29.6 AM – particularly when we were near the University on Central. What it was, what it did, and what it sounded like will also be a short part of the presentation. It was actually on 43 MHz, but when we got close to it with our old Gonset Super 6 Converters and similar equipment of the early ‘60’s, its powerful signal would “bleed over” onto many of our less expensive, less well filtered receivers.

All the audio clips are short – and they come from stations very much all around the world.
ARRL’s QST ran a short article on Numbers Stations in the October 2019 issue. I contributed to that article.

I promise you a fascinating evening !

Sample recordings (click to play)

Numbers and Data

The Lincolnshire Poacher

Please note the new time for general meetings – 6:30 PM NOT 7:00 or 7:30 PM!
The purpose of the meeting is to conduct normal business of the URFMSI as may be appropriate.
Members and visitors alike are invited to attend. Please bring a fellow ham along, or
someone who is interested in becoming a ham or is curious about what we do.

Minutes from past meetings can be found here.

Presentations given at past meetings can be found here

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Close up map. Click for a full size. ——->

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The entrance to the church. ——->

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