Wednesday, March 6, join Yasmin Adib, Kazu Ijeema, Neil Saad, Jinsoo Kim in a public
forum at the Martin Luther King Labor Center in Manhattan, 310 West 43rd Street, near 8th
Avenue.
That's Wednesday, March 6, 6.30 p.m.
For more information, call 212-925-6675, extension 236.
This has been a public service of WBAI on behalf of the Palestine Solidarity Committee.
And this is WBAI New York.
Stay tuned for Off the Hook.
This is Radio Moscow.
And imagine what it was like if you tried to tune into the BBC or the Voice of America
and heard only jamming coming from your own government, and heard the news you just heard
over and over and over again.
And worst of all, the fact you couldn't get talk radio.
Gosh, that'd be awful.
We can jam radio talk shows, too.
This particular talk show is very naive, and we were able to put in all these tapes and
make him all flustered.
So here it is right now.
Well, I hope you're here, Sharman.
All right.
Here's Roy Story Sports.
Someone liked it.
Yeah.
Honestly.
I was joking.
It's ice, as we used to call it, but it's the same difference.
And it's better than cold coffee, I'll tell you that.
And so let's find out what's on.
Hello?
Oh, we have somebody on line one.
Are you there?
Hello?
Yes.
Can't we hear each other?
Am I on?
You sure are.
Say something.
Hello?
Hello.
I hear you.
Hello?
Are you trying to listen on the radio?
Am I on?
You sure are.
Say something.
Hello?
Hello.
I hear you.
Hello?
Are you trying to listen on the radio?
Am I on?
Don't you hear him?
You hear him?
Hello?
Yeah, I hear him.
Hello?
He can't hear us, I guess.
Well, that's the way it goes.
I don't know what happened or why, but he was on the air.
But he couldn't hear us, and we could hear him.
OK.
Hello there.
Who's this?
This is Van Colvick.
Van Colvick.
My main interests are in fishing and hunting.
They happen to be hobbies of mine personally.
Boy, you're a good listener.
Boy, you're with a bunch of other people, I'll tell you that.
I'm going to have you say that.
My tongue's getting...
I'm so excited here.
You are?
Well, turn your radio down a little bit.
That'll make it easier for you.
And thank you, all you folks.
I don't know what he's doing, but...
It's not a honeymoon, is it?
They don't allow little 10-year-olds up this late at night, I don't think, do they?
I mean, all parents, you know.
Their children let them watch TV for 30 minutes a day and PBS for an hour.
They send them to bed at 7 o'clock and all that sort of thing.
Isn't that it?
They get up and make the bed and do everything else.
Sure, they do.
But they get their kicks out of this, and they go around and chuckling,
say, look what I did.
Oh.
It's like the guys that run around with their radios on so loud
you can hear them four blocks down the streets,
and you want to ask them what else they got for Christmas,
but they never tell you.
Hello there.
Who's this?
Again, it's one of the three-year-olds that we have on the air every once in a while.
I wish that woman would take her children and put them to bed at that time of night.
Okay, you're back on IWH.
I bet you can't top that.
Hold on a minute.
Everybody's talking at once.
Dan, shut up.
Mark, shut up.
Mickey, shut up.
Everybody, quiet.
Stop.
No, you don't have to get mad at me.
Mark, that's me.
Okay, everybody shut up there.
That was the sound of negative land here on WBAI Off the Hook
with a selection called JamCon 84,
which came out a few years ago,
where nothing but radio,
the magic of radio and the dangers of radio,
nothing but those two subjects are explored.
And that's kind of what we're going to be exploring here tonight.
You just heard the magic of radio.
You just heard a speech by our president
and commentary by Mishio Kaku
concerning what we all hope will be the end of this war
and the resumption of normal lives for the vast majority of us.
We will have to wait and see.
Stay tuned to BAI for more information on that.
We're going to take a break from that particular madness
to explore our own particular brand of madness right now,
which has to do with what is going on in the electromagnetic sphere out there.
We're here with Bob Horvitz,
who is the Washington correspondent for the Whole Earth Review.
He's in from Washington, D.C.
He's also the former head of the Association of North American Radio Clubs.
Right now he's working on helping new local community radio stations,
maybe just like WBAI.
He's helping them get on the air in parts of Eastern and Central Europe.
Bob, welcome to WBAI.
Thanks, Emanuel. It's fun to be here.
I understand you were here before, many, many years ago.
A really dedicated listener out there might recognize your name.
Yeah, actually it's brought back so many memories.
I got my start in radio journalism right here at this station 14 years ago.
14 years ago.
Now, what kind of things have you brought for us today?
I think we are going to be hearing something very soon in the background.
Yeah, I got some sound that I've gathered over the years from Shortwave.
Shortwave is a band with lots of strange stuff going on in it.
A lot of people think it's ham radio, but it's a lot more than that.
It's used for international communications and a lot of military stuff in there.
I think I hear something coming out.
What is this person saying?
I think he's talking backwards.
He's saying numbers in, I believe, Czech.
Okay, let's take a listen to this.
Now, this is the kind of thing that you can come across listening to any shortwave radio.
Yeah, just outside the band is used for broadcasting.
There are channels used for other purposes.
Every day, maybe two, three, four, five dozen times a day,
you'll hear some voice come on reciting a stream of groups of numbers in different languages.
Over here in North America, we mostly hear them in Spanish and English.
Over in Europe, they're primarily in German and Czech and Romanian and Bulgarian.
In Asia, they're primarily in Chinese.
These are believed by many people to be messages sent to secret agents
located in foreign countries from their controlling government
with instructions and information that they can translate using different sorts of pads.
One-time pads, they're called, or in some cases, devices that translate the information.
Now, I've heard these transmissions on occasion,
and anybody out there with a shortwave radio can just kind of turn it on and wander through,
and you might catch one of these.
They tend to last for about, what, 20 minutes or so?
Yeah, it depends how long the message is,
and these are not the kind of thing that have announced schedules.
No.
A lot of them have very regular patterns,
as you can learn what frequencies are used at what time,
but they tend to change over time.
What kind of a message could be passed in this manner?
Each number, give us an example.
Each number would represent, what, a letter?
Well, if you listen carefully, you'll hear they're in groups,
and I can't speak from any kind of personal knowledge about what the code is, how it's constructed,
but most people think these groups of four or five numbers are the unit of communication,
and either there's a lookup table that the agent has,
where he looks up the meaning of, say, 253-119,
and it might represent one word or one phrase.
Now, I've got a couple of other tapes that are different kinds of coding.
One that's kind of attractive to listen to is a tone code used by the Soviet Union.
A Canadian professor named Hugh Hamilton was arrested with a device for receiving this kind of code,
and it's a little more entertaining to listen to.
Okay, well, our listeners might be transcribing this right now,
so let's give them a chance to get more of the meaning of this code.
This is Czech.
This is in Czech, and I was just in Eastern Europe about two months ago
and was very surprised to hear these broadcasts still going on.
Inside Czechoslovakia, it's quite clear they're not originating in Czechoslovakia.
They're being broadcast to Czechoslovakia from, I would guess, the Soviet Union.
Now, I was told, I believe it was Monitoring Times that did some sort of investigation,
or it might be another publication.
There was actually a book that came out on what they call the number stations,
and they had traced it to Washington, D.C., traced it to a building,
and I believe the numbers were in Spanish and in German.
Right.
One wonders why are they broadcasting Spanish and German from Washington, D.C.?
What are they up to?
I've actually visited that site.
It's not in Washington.
It's in a countryside between Remington and Warrington, Virginia,
a very pretty countryside of just hills and farms and cows.
And the station there is actually owned and operated by the Army Signals Warfare Training Center.
Oh, that's the tone code I was talking about earlier.
Let me stop talking for a minute because it's an interesting sound.
Okay. Let's take a listen to this.
Now, that's kind of noisy.
I'm sorry there's a lot of interference to it.
This was not a strong signal.
If you listen carefully, you hear there are ten musical tones,
and each one is about one second long.
And the device that this Canadian professor, Hugh Hamilton, was caught with
was about the size of a pack of cigarettes,
and it had the ten numbers on the top of the thing.
It's like a radio receiver, and each time the tone matched the number that was the equivalent of it,
the number would light up.
Fascinating.
You need one of these special devices to make full use of this.
You don't want to just listen to the musical tones.
Right. Or you could build your own, I suppose.
Now, this particular transmission is coming from the Soviet Union.
Oh, I don't know. I'm just guessing at the origin.
These stations don't tell you where they're broadcasting from or who they're broadcasting to.
It's just that when I heard this, I had just read about Hugh Hamilton
and had seen the device, the photograph of it,
and recognized that this is exactly the code that his device was designed to pick up,
and I've never heard any other broadcast like it.
Is this the only time you were able to tune into this?
Yeah, yeah. There are other tone codes.
The British, for instance, use a code called piccolo, which they use for diplomatic communications.
That's also a very attractive sound.
It's 32 tones, and very much faster.
More sophisticated.
Yeah, it's more like a burbling brook.
I have some of that if you want to hear it.
But this is a slow tone designed to go through noisy atmospheric conditions,
just like you're hearing now.
Let's take a more in-depth listen to that.
I'm wondering how many times myself or our listeners may have been tuning through
and just thought this was, you know, noise, static, interference.
Oh, I think that's enough of that.
I'm sorry it's so noisy.
It's kind of annoying to listen to.
Well, it's not your fault.
This kind of thing is happening all the time on shortwave.
We just got a shortwave radio here at the radio station,
and we're kind of playing around with it, trying to find things.
So I imagine people will be in there later on trying to decode messages.
Yeah, yeah. New York's kind of tough for shortwave
because you have so many tall buildings with steel skeletons,
and that makes reception tough.
Plus you have so much energy in the air from local communications.
What do we have here?
I think that's the same tape we were playing earlier.
Play it through a little bit more.
You'll hear some more numbers in another language.
Right, that's the numbers station again.
Or, you know, what you might do is you asked me a couple days ago
if I could tune in some war-related communications,
and unfortunately that was already winding down.
Not unfortunately, but yeah.
Yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that.
I've said that myself.
But last night when I was looking for something to play on the air,
I found this sound, which is going in the background now.
I kind of think it's an equipment malfunction,
but it's a pretty interesting one, and it sounds a little bit like a tone code.
Let's take a listen.
Most amazing.
Most amazing. I have never heard anything like this before.
Well, now that you have a shortwave station here at the station,
you can find a lot of stuff.
In fact, you know, you have news agency teletype broadcasts
from third-world countries coming in by shortwave.
Well, you have those things that sound like airplanes
that are, when you tune around on the shortwave dial,
those horrible noises.
Yeah, yeah.
And I always wondered how you go about decoding that.
Well, I suspect you're talking about radars,
and, you know, you're not really designed to listen to them
as though they were communication.
They're sending a sound out, and then the operator is looking at the echo.
So really what they're seeing is a picture of what's out there
in the reflection zone from the radar.
And depending what tape you picked up,
it might be the Soviet Union's woodpecker,
which a lot of people are familiar with.
Actually, I think this is the number station again.
Oh, still.
Same language, too. We're trying to find a different language.
Right. I think you went past the Spanish.
I'll flip it over.
Yeah, just random flip it over.
We'll get a good language here.
They do it in all different languages.
Ha ha ha!
It's the same language.
Any idea what English might be?
Well, turn on your radio, and you're bound to hear some.
The broadcast from Warrington, Virginia that we were talking about.
Tell us about that building. You were beginning to tell us about that.
It's not really much of a building.
It's got barbed wires around it and lots of big antennas
and a couple of ray domes down there.
And it's not the kind of place you want to hang out too much.
It's really a robotized automatic station.
There's only one or two people there.
Like most of the FM stations on this island.
Ha ha ha!
We know about those. We know about them.
Even more robotized.
But the messages aren't robotized.
Somebody has to bring in the message. How do they do that?
No, that's robotized too.
If you listen carefully, it's a very clever device.
I know the actual machine that reads the numbers is a machine.
In fact, I hear the same lady that reads your telephone number.
In fact, let me see if I can get her on the line.
She's busy most of the time, but let's see if we can actually get her.
Oh, no, she's busy now too, unfortunately.
Okay, folks, if you dial 958, okay?
Anybody in a listening area who lives in New York, I believe, can do that.
I'm told some people in New Jersey can also do it.
Dial 958 and you'll hear this computer voice read back your telephone number.
And I've heard that lady.
I've heard her on the radio reading out numbers, spitting out numbers.
So they rent her voice.
And there's a device.
But what I was asking was how do they get the numbers into the radio station
to tell them what numbers to read?
I can risk arrest and tell you a little bit of what I know.
I just think it would be kind of stupid if they did it over the phone.
No, there's a microwave link that goes down from Langley, Virginia,
to the facility in Warrington, Virginia,
and you can draw your own conclusions from that.
Well, we all know what's in Langley.
Headquarters for Sears or something big like that.
This is Romanian.
And dig this robot voice.
Wow.
Sorry.
That's Romanian.
Romanian sounds a lot like Spanish, I've noticed.
When was this particular broadcast taped?
Oh, you'd have to look on the cassette.
I'd say probably five, six, seven years ago.
So this was in the height of Cescudom.
And this is not a guy sitting in the studio reading these numbers.
I would hope not.
Somebody, this fellow, has recorded his voice reading the numbers,
and each number is on a little, say, mini-cassette,
or maybe a solid-state memory,
and there's some sort of mechanical typewriter device
that translates the numbers into a selection of which voice loop to put in sequence.
So this can be fully automated, just record the numbers once,
and then you can combine them in different ways.
I see.
We're going to another language?
This is Spanish.
This is Spanish.
This is the one coming from a Virginia.
Now, is that code attached to it, or is that another station?
The ham radio operators like to cause interference to these stations
just to give them a hard time.
Ah.
A little bit of jamming, eh?
Yeah.
We're here speaking with Bob Horvitz,
who is the Washington correspondent for the Whole Earth Review
and a radio buff, as I know many of our off-the-hook listeners are.
And if you want to call up and ask some questions,
feel free, 212-279-3400.
We'll be taking phone calls in just a couple of minutes.
Has anyone ever successfully decoded one of these messages?
Not that I know of.
I do know one fellow who spent months logging every single code he could hear
of this very lady,
and he found that, in fact, there are repeat broadcasts of messages
one, two, three months apart,
which made him think, and I think he's right,
that it's really used for training purposes.
Training purposes?
Yeah.
They're just giving some agent-to-be practice.
Now, probably they're mixing in real transmissions
with the training transmissions.
That's the kind of thing which could really tie up the monitoring service
of some paranoid country that speaks Spanish.
But just the fact that there's repeat broadcasts
kind of suggests that not every single one of them is a genuine message.
Incredible.
Now, how many different languages have you heard this in?
You've heard English, Spanish, Romanian, Czech?
Chinese, Russian, Bulgarian, German.
But it doesn't necessarily mean that all those countries are participating.
It just basically means that those are the languages that we could be doing them all.
Right.
Well, no, you can tell from the time of day and the frequency and how loud it is.
And like I said, I heard in Czechoslovakia the broadcast,
and I could tell just from the sound quality it was not a local signal.
It was coming from within, say, a thousand miles,
but it wasn't coming from this continent.
What do you recommend to people that are just getting started listening to this kind of thing?
What's the best thing to dive into first, BBC monitoring or Radio Moscow,
or jump right into the numbers stations?
You know, the outbreak of hostilities this past month
has made the sales of shortwave radios just go through the roof.
And I think now if people go to the stores to buy one,
they're going to find they're sold out.
So give them a week or two to restock.
And I think a lot of people have been buying these radios to tune in,
whatever they can, from foreign points of view.
Well, let's assume that a lot of our listeners have done just that,
have gone out and bought shortwave radios.
Now the thing is sitting in the corner.
They can make it pick up CBS radio, okay,
but they can't really get it to pick up anything above that.
The thing with shortwave, you have to be very patient.
You have to realize it's not radio like we know it.
They're not on 24 hours a day.
They change languages every half hour.
And also frequencies change throughout the course of a day.
It starts off high and moves down as nighttime approaches.
How would you explain that to somebody that's never experienced this before?
What is worth all that trouble and effort?
Well, some people may not think it is,
but it's true it's a different kind of listening.
You can't do it just passively.
You can't be able just to press the button
and find a strong, clear signal on the same old frequency day in, day out.
It's really more of a hunting device,
and you have to have the attitude that you use it as a search tool,
as an investigative tool.
And after a while, I think you'll realize that generally it's noisy
and it's not going to sound as clear as, say, WBAI.
So the first thing you ought to do is buy yourself a cheap set of headphones,
good old Walkman kind of headphones is really enough.
Is that just to avoid annoying other people in your house?
Well, yeah, that too, but there's some psychological thing
that when the sound is created inside your head,
when you have the sense that the sound is sort of originating inside your head,
it's easier to focus on the signal and screen out the noise.
I don't know why that is,
but it's just psychologically a fact that shortwave is a lot more intelligible
when you have headphones.
So static that comes from inside your head is more bearable than static that comes from outside?
I have to remember that.
That can come in handy very many times.
I prefer my own static too.
But the other thing you can do is at the other end of the radio,
you have that antenna, and portable radios come with a whip,
and that's adequate to give you access to the loudest stations.
But if you really want to use this thing to its full potential,
you really ought to clip a piece of wire to it.
The longer the better, the higher the better.
And just make sure it's bare metal contacting the whip antenna.
You can staple it to your ceiling or throw it out the window.
Just experiment.
Antenna design is an art, not a science these days.
I know some people use metal bookcases or window screens or bed springs,
and just try any metal object and see what it does.
Coat hangers?
Coat hangers.
That's really not big enough.
You need length because shortwaves are long.
They're a lot longer than FM,
and you want to get an antenna really long to capture as much of that signal as is in the air.
You can also not limit your listening to just shortwave stations.
You can hear amateur radio people talking about,
well, usually they talk about their radios, which is really boring.
But you hear that.
You can sometimes hear mobile phone calls.
You can hear phone patches.
A friend of mine tells me on his shortwave radio he was able to listen to Air Force One
and actually hear President Carter making what they call a phone patch,
which is a phone call back down to the Earth.
I think the Space Shuttle Recovery Team had a frequency that people were listening to for quite a while
as they were picking debris out of the Atlantic Ocean.
Now, I think we have, is that the Woodpecker Project in there?
Is that what it says?
Yeah.
This is a well-known annoying sound that most shortwave listeners use.
I'm not sure if it's cued up to the right area.
No, that's still, do I have to go further ahead in the tape?
It's a different tape.
Okay.
I want to take some phone calls.
The Woodpecker's not on the air anymore for people that are familiar with it.
Here it is.
Here's the cassette.
This is the side, right there.
But when I bought a shortwave radio and tuned it on,
I heard this annoying sound, which you're just about to hear right now.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
And I don't know about you, Emmanuel, but when I get pissed off at something, I study it.
And so I became really interested in the Woodpecker and got deeply into it.
And thank goodness this is no longer on the air,
but this signal used to hop around the spectrum and just disrupt.
I remember this.
I would hear it all over the place.
Yeah.
Now, what in God's name is it?
What could a signal like that possibly accomplish?
A lot of people have speculated.
The Soviet Union, which acknowledges or acknowledged that it was the source of the signal,
only said that it was, did you hear the sound quality change?
It's much softer now.
Uh-huh.
This is the only time I've ever heard this.
They're experimenting with different waveforms and they're modifying it slightly,
and in a few seconds you'll hear it turn from this kind of soft thump into a chirp.
And as a complete coincidence, I found a scientific report in a Russian radio magazine
reporting on this very experiment.
They were using it here.
Here are the chirp sounds.
Ah, yes.
They're using it for ionospheric research to study the layers of electrons in the upper air.
So it's probably used for more than one purpose,
and a lot of people have speculated it's for mind control or weather manipulation
or all kinds of far-out things.
But I've studied it in depth, and I'm pretty convinced that it's an over-the-horizon radar
which was designed to track airplanes and ships.
You say it's no longer in the air.
Why did they take it off the air?
I can't say.
I mean, the Soviets would have to tell you.
My theory is that it really never performed that well.
And there it goes back to the normal sound.
Remember when the Korean airliner was shot down by the Soviet Union?
It was flying right up the beam of the woodpecker for most of its trip,
and they still couldn't locate where it was exactly.
And I think after that experience they started to phase out the system.
There were three sites.
One site was shut down right after that, and then finally the other two sites were shut down.
Where would you say this particular transmission was coming from?
This particular transmission was coming from between Kiev and Minsk
in the European part of the Soviet Union.
The one that was shut down was on the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Siberia.
The third site was just north of the Black Sea and into China.
We rarely hear that site in North America.
Okay, we're talking with Bob Horvitz of Whole Earth Review and Radio Buff,
working with some community stations in eastern Europe.
Let's talk about that in a little while.
Let's first go to a couple of phone calls
and see if there's any interesting questions or points out there.
Good evening.
Hello.
I'm having trouble hearing you. Hold on.
There, that's better. Go ahead.
The woodpecker's drowning you out. That's the problem.
Okay, we'll turn that down a little bit. Go ahead.
Hi, I'm a ham radio operator, and I heard you just got a shortwave radio there.
You're talking about the woodpecker.
Interesting thing happened.
Last night I was talking to a ham in Australia, and we send traffic back and forth on Amtor.
You're familiar with Amtor, like Sitor?
Yeah, that's a radio teletype system for ham radio operators.
Yeah, and he told me that, he said it beat all.
He heard the woodpecker last night.
No kidding. Are you sure it was the woodpecker from the Soviet Union?
Because Australia has an over-the-horizon radar now, too.
Over-the-horizon backscatter radar.
Had the same pulse rate as the woodpecker.
He has a, maybe you've seen the woodpecker noise blanker.
I think Guilford or somebody puts them out.
He said that it was definitely the woodpecker.
He might be hearing the one aimed into China, which we don't hear very well at all.
Probably because it would beam to the south to him.
Yeah.
It was rather interesting, and I've heard a couple other hams on the band talking about that it was back.
A couple OH stations in Europe, and I thought to myself,
well, maybe it's a sign that Glasnost is sort of going its way.
I don't know, because I noticed that with Gorbachev,
when everyone was voting him for his humanitarian efforts,
the woodpecker, that was about the time it disappeared.
Maybe he's cracking down again.
Maybe they're getting the woodpecker back up for whatever reason.
Maybe it has something to do with the war.
Or maybe they sold it to some third world country somewhere.
Somehow I don't know.
It wouldn't fit too well, I don't think.
It's possible.
By the way, I wonder if you're aware the United States uses its own woodpecker.
Yes.
Yes, in fact, I was going to bring a recording of it.
It's a very different sound, and the U.S. Air Force, so far,
has been very, very good about avoiding interference.
It sounds more like a buzz, and they can change the frequency and the bandwidth at will,
so it sounds lots of different ways.
It's very hard to explain or even record the sound,
because it changes its sound quality so much.
Time, all sorts of strange frequencies.
You know, I started getting interested in shortwave not because I'm a technical person,
but because I wanted to have access to foreign sources of information.
But once you get the device, you get so much more than just news from the shortwave.
It's kind of hard to ignore all this other stuff going on.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, out of all the bands that the shortwave picks up,
there's so few that are actually relaying human voice.
That's right. 15% of the spectrum is for broadcasting.
15% is for broadcasting, and what's the rest of it?
Well, you know, shortwave has this magical property of going long distances
and following the curve of the Earth and being able to cover thousands of miles.
So it's reserved for long-distance communication, and that means air-to-ground.
Every airplane that flies across an ocean has a shortwave radio for air traffic control.
Every ship, when it leaves the port, keeps in touch with shore stations through shortwave.
Radio astronomy. Radar. We heard the woodpecker.
You know, it's a long-range radar signal.
So the band is divided up into all sorts of little bands
because so many uses want parts of the spectrum,
and they have to keep changing channels because the conditions change
every minute, every hour, every day, every month.
Good evening.
Hello. You're on the air.
Is anyone there?
Occasionally I call this fall asleep.
Good evening.
Hi.
How you doing?
Hi.
Well, you're awake. What's on your mind?
Okay, this is a great broadcast.
I am a shortwave radio freak.
I mean, I am absolutely addicted to the thing.
For how long?
Since 1985.
And I have a nice little Sony 7600A portable.
And I listen to it hours and hours a day.
And I'm frustrated because I don't know anybody else who listens to shortwave.
And I would love to just get together with other shortwave nuts
and yak and socialize and exchange information.
I'm sure there's a shortwave support group in this city somewhere.
That's right.
Is there shortwave listeners anonymous in New York City?
You know, there's an association of North American radio clubs,
which I used to be the head of,
and that's the Umbrella Organization for shortwave listeners.
And it's true that it's a medium which is a little more difficult
than AM listening or FM listening.
You really do need to share information to get the most out of your radio.
Let's see.
In fact, BAI listeners have been faxing me frequencies
to listen to various countries during this whole war thing.
In fact, let me give out my fax number again in case anybody wants to do that,
because it is very helpful.
We've been able to get things for the radio station.
516-751-2608.
And just fax whatever information you have if you have frequencies.
What I'd like to do is...
Hello?
Yeah, hi.
What I'd like to be able to do is maybe speak to you off the air
after this program is over
and find out how to get in touch with other shortwave listeners in the metropolitan area.
Well, if you can figure out how to penetrate the switchboard, you're welcome to.
I'll tell you what.
I don't know the address of the current head of the Association of North American Radio Clubs.
Excuse me, excuse me.
I'm going to have to ask everybody to be quiet for a second because I hear English here.
So hold on one moment.
5-7-2-5-8-0-7-9-3-5-0-0-6.
Isn't that something?
That's English numbers.
I mean, there's no big deal about that, but we've heard that lady before.
I know I have.
To get back to the caller's question, though,
I'll tell you what.
Let me give you my address,
and if you or anybody else who's listening wants to get in touch with shortwave listening clubs,
since I didn't bring my address book with me,
just write to 1122.5 E Street.
E as in electromagnetic.
E Street, Southeast, in Washington, D.C.
2-0-0-0-3.
I feel like a numbers station here.
Well, numbers are an integral part of our lives.
We are numbers, and we live with numbers.
Thanks very much for calling.
Let's try to fit in a couple more calls.
Good evening.
Yes.
Go ahead.
Okay.
You haven't mentioned the 11th year sunspot cycle.
Well, you just brought it up.
So it's an important event for people that depend on the ionosphere,
and we're just coming off the...
It changes the range of all the shortwave stations you might want to listen to
because they're reflected from the ionosphere,
and instead of following the curve of the Earth,
the shortwave signals the aircraft depend on are often reflected from the ionosphere.
That's right.
They change their frequencies in accordance with the 11th year sunspot cycles.
And like I said, when you're interested in foreign news and you get a shortwave,
you learn a lot more than you wanted initially,
and you can't help but notice the solar weather, the geomagnetic weather,
because all these weather conditions affect the way shortwave sounds.
And if you turn to WWV, which is what, 5, 10, and 15 kilohertz?
Megahertz.
Megahertz. I'm sorry.
I always get that mixed up, too.
They give you information on just that,
so you'll hear all this cryptic talk about sunspot activity.
Thanks very much for calling.
Let's see if we can squeeze in one more call.
Good evening.
Hello.
Yeah. Go ahead.
Hi. How are you?
Okay.
I just called to get somebody on shortwave listening.
I used the ICF-2010 by Sony.
Uh-huh.
And I also used the DX-440 by Radio Shack,
and the Sony ICF-700DS, 7600DS.
I see.
And I would very much like to know how I can reach that woman who just called you before about the...
I don't know that there is a shortwave club for New York.
I know someone tried to start one called the Urban DXer,
because really the problems are very special for high-density environments like this.
There's a fellow out in Staten Island, and I don't remember his name or his address,
but let me give my address once more, and if people will write to me,
I'll try to put them in touch with each other.
I'm in Washington, D.C., so it's 1122 1⁄2 E Street, Southeast, Washington, D.C., 20003.
Okay.
And I can also suggest the back page of various weekly newspapers, perhaps,
for people interested in starting such a group.
Yeah.
Let's listen to a few more seconds of this numbers, and then we'll fade out of here ourselves.
6-9-6-8-3-2-3-1-2-5-5-5-7-9-3-9-
I think I'm going to ask you for a recording of this, because this is just so incredible.
Sure.
And I want to ask you a question, too.
Go ahead.
We just saw each other in Washington.
You came down for a very interesting event.
A conference on First Amendment rights and the electronic media.
And I was at that conference, and we've been talking technical stuff,
and I really didn't want it to be a whole show devoted to the technical side,
because the politics of radio are really interesting,
and it overlaps into the politics of data communications and computers and telephones as well.
What was your take on that meeting?
Well, we've moved into an era where technology is a vital part of society,
and we have to start recognizing First Amendment issues.
We have to start recognizing privacy issues.
And the sad fact of the matter is we have not.
The sad fact of the matter is law enforcement has not,
and our elected officials have not,
mostly because they do not understand why a computer bulletin board is the exact same thing as a printing press of sorts
or a gathering place.
And hence, the same protections are not afforded to that particular medium.
We're all going to be in much worse shape in the future if we don't start paying attention.
I think the meeting that they had this week in Washington was a good start,
but I'm kind of tired of always saying it's a good start.
I want to get further than a good start.
It was a different kind of meeting because it was an attempt to build bridges
between the people who are, say, part of the computer underground and the law enforcement community
and make them a little more sensitive to the fact that just because somebody is creative with a computer
doesn't mean they're a criminal.
And I really wonder after that meeting whether it's a good idea to actually work with the FBI
because, frankly, they're primarily interested in gathering evidence.
It seems that way.
One thing that I think is important is to fight fire with fire.
If they come after you and try to implicate you in things,
you show how they're wrong in what they're doing.
Obviously, you need to show respect to a degree,
but that respect does not have to eclipse what it is you stand for.
You don't have to back down from what you stand for.
And I think that's something.
I wish we did have more time to talk about this because it's a fascinating issue
and it's what we'll be talking about in future editions of this program.
Hopefully, we can get you on here again sometime.
I'd love to.
And let me take a second to say what good work you do in your publication 2600
and this show like that.
You're really on target on a lot of the activism that you devote your time to.
Thanks very much.
It started off being just a hacker type of a thing, but it turned into activism, I know.
For those that are interested, there's a meeting this Friday at the lobby of the Citicorp building
with a whole bunch of hackers that are being chased and spied upon
by a whole bunch of law enforcement people, but we don't care anymore.
And this has been Off the Hook.
We'll be back again in two weeks.
We're going to go out with a little bit of negative land.
If I can get the right machine to come up here.
There we are.
A bit of negative land from JamCon 84.
Emanuel Goldstein.
Our next program is from JamCon 84.
See you in two weeks.
Stay tuned for the personal computer show.
I told Jim, I had one idea for him.
I said, we can make a documentary about jammers and jamming with all the Bay Area jammers
and play it at the convention.