A numbers station is a type of shortwave radio station characterized by unusual broadcasts, often created by artificially generated voices reciting streams of numbers, words, letters, tunes or Morse code. They are transmitted in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually female, although sometimes men's or children's voices are used. A fascinating overview of numbers stations can be listened to HERE in a BBC Radio 4 programme.
The best known of the numbers stations is the 'Lincolnshire Poacher' which was a powerful shortwave station that transmitted from the mid-1970s to June 2008. The station gained its commonly known name as it uses bars from the English folk song 'The Lincolnshire Poacher' as an interval signal. The radio station was believed to be operated by the British Secret Intelligence Service and emanated from the island of Cyprus. Amateur direction finding linked it with the Royal Air Force base at Akrotiri, Cyprus, where several curtain antennas had been identified as being its transmitter. It consisted of an electronically synthesised English-accented female voice reading groups of five numbers: e.g. '0-2-5-8-8'. The final number in each group was spoken at a higher pitch. It is likely that the station was used to communicate to undercover agents operating in other countries, to be decoded using a form of one-time pad…
