Listening In The Night Mystery Cache
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(micro)
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THE CACHE IS NOT AT THE LISTED COORDINATES! ... nor is there anything else useful at the published coords.
You can’t imagine how excited I was to see GeoGeeBee’s exceptionally-fun and educational puzzle cache Calling All Spies when it was published. Old memories came flooding back, and I was soon deep in nostalgia remembering when I was a boy listening to my own shortwave radio.
Ultimately, after working on the puzzle and eventually finding the physical cache, I decided to place a radio-themed puzzle cache of my own. The first step (same as with any cache, of course) would be to find a location for the physical hide and I had high hopes to knock this step out quickly. Until I had the location identified, I was determined not to let my mind wander onto the puzzle side of the cache. But I wasn’t successful: the first likely location that I found turned out to have a “No Trespassing” sign that I didn’t see the first time I visited and several subsequent locations were all less-than-great in some way or another. Eventually, I did manage to find a workable-though-not-exciting location and, as it turns out, my mind must’ve been working on the puzzle subconsciously as I searched for a physical location for the hide. Like magic, a fully formed concept for the puzzle appeared in my mind as soon as I felt like I had settled on a location.
In keeping with the spirit of GeoGeeBee’s, my goal was to make an educational and fun-to-read cache page with a number of links that the puzzle-solver could click on to learn something new about shortwave radio. So, to jump-start my brain regarding cache page construction and links that I might provide, I started thinking back to when I was a boy and I also started doing some more reading on shortwave radios.
The event, or moment, that first got me interested in shortwave radio was when I was in about the fourth grade. Every year for Christmas I got one “big” present (usually not very big, really) and a few smaller things. No present in the past had seemed as big or magical as what my parents gave me that year, though: a shortwave radio with more dials and numbers and little lights and controls than any ten-year-old boy could have ever hoped for. I can still remember opening it and looking at all of the bands it could receive, all of the dials it had, the map of the world on front showing the various time zones. Not long after figuring out how to use my new radio, I was staying up waaaaaaaaaaay past my bedtime listening to broadcasts. Getting good reception during the day is difficult with a shortwave radio because shortwave signals propagate better at night because, due to the absence of the sun, the properties of the ionosphere change at night and certain types of radio waves are able to travel greater distances. If you choose to, you can learn a lot about this topic by poking around on the internet. No need for me to provide you with too many links, just start with fun search terms like “skywave”, “DXing”, and ...well, just start poking around. Trust me, you’ll find plenty to read about.
Hearing the sound of voices coming over that first radio was thrilling: faint signals crackling with static, distant speakers using languages that sounded 100% impenetrable, announcers speaking of heaven only knew what strange and remote events in faraway cities, broadcasts interrupted or overlain by mysterious electronic sounds, sometimes fading away altogether. Early symptoms of a strong interest in international things, that’s what I see now when I look back on this early interest in listening to my shortwave radio.
Now that I’m older, I guess, or maybe just busier, my interest in radios has pretty much vanished. I’m interested in other things, or maybe my interest in international things is fully taken care of by my work. GeoGeeBee’s cache provided a very fun journey back in time, though, and might have even reignited my interest in listening to shortwave again. How can I express my thanks? This admittedly-somewhat-derivative-but-hopefully-fun-nevertheless puzzle cache, of course! Clearly it's not as cool as GeoGeeBee's cache, but I do hope some of you will find it entertaining. Who knows, maybe it'll inspire a few of you to dig out your old shortwave radios.
You can check your solution to this puzzle on geochecker.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
CHMMYR UVAGF:
(1) EVS
(2) Jryy ortha vf unys qbar.
(3) Urer Vf Lbhe Arkg Uvag.
PNPUR UVAG: fvyirel anab