Archive for the ‘dx’ Category

Nostalgic DX Radio: Numbers Stations

Sunday, November 27th, 2011

Decades ago I was an avid DX (e.g.shortwave) radio listener / band-scanner / radio ham.  At that time, of the “cold war”, tining around the short waves revealed strong German language stations on unusual frequencies starting with four rising notes on a slightly violin-sounding crude electronic synthesizer.  This was followed by a woman (dubbed by some as “Magdeburg Annie”) reading five-figure number groups, apparently to spies.  Intriguingly, the german numbers were read in some kind of non-standard form, which my german teachers at school could not recognize.  To me they sounded like “zvo” (zwie/two), “fun-ef” (funf/five) and “noi-hen” (noin/nine), and maybe another one “trinnif” that I never figured out.  I wondered if these were nautical german pronunciations, but now it seems they were East German spy number-pronunciations.  So guess that puts my German teachers in the clear!

Anyhow, in a burst of nostalgia, I now want audio copies to use as ringtones on my phone.  Google [numbers stations] revealed the following sites linking to downloadable audio recordings (mp3 and wma files):