Imagine you are sitting in a dark room, late at night, in front of a glowing screen and a complex-looking radio receiver. Outside, the city of Jerusalem is quiet, but in your headphones, the airwaves are screaming with a rhythmic, mechanical buzz. Then, suddenly, the noise cuts out. A cold, synthesized male voice begins to speak. It is not reading the news or playing music. It is just reading numbers. Two, five, zero, nine, one. It repeats the sequence, then moves on to the next. You have no idea what it means, but you know that somewhere in the world, someone is listening with a piece of paper and a pencil, receiving instructions that could change the course of a war.
That is the haunting reality of number stations, Herman. It is a world that feels like it belongs in a Cold War spy novel, yet here we are in March of two thousand twenty-six, and these signals are more active than they have been in decades. Hey everyone, I am Corn Poppleberry, and welcome to My Weird Prompts.
And I am Herman Poppleberry. You know, we usually have our housemate Daniel send us a prompt to kick things off, but today, we actually decided to dive into this one ourselves. The headlines have been so dominated by the regional conflict lately that we started looking into how information is actually moving behind the scenes, beyond the internet and satellite links. We are talking about the ultimate low-tech survival of information.
Right, and it led us down this incredible rabbit hole of shortwave radio enthusiasts and specifically the Priyom project. If you go to priyom dot org, you find this community of people who are essentially doing amateur signals intelligence. They are logging, recording, and triangulating these mysterious broadcasts twenty-four hours a day. They are the watchers on the wall, but for the electromagnetic spectrum.
It is fascinating because most people think of shortwave radio as a dead technology. We have five G, we have Starlink, we have encrypted messaging apps like Signal or Telegram. Why on earth would a state intelligence agency still be using a technology from the nineteen-forties to communicate with their assets? It seems almost primitive.
That is exactly what we are going to unpack today. We are going to look at why these stations are actually more secure than the most advanced digital encryption. We will talk about the Priyom community and their dedication to this craft. And then, we are going to do a deep dive into a brand new mystery that has the whole community talking: a station called V-thirty-two that just popped up a few days ago, right as the conflict in Iran began.
I have been looking at the logs for V-thirty-two all morning, and the speculation is wild. But before we get to the new stuff, let's establish the basics for everyone who might not be familiar with what a number station actually is. Corn, when we say number station, what are we literally talking about?
At its simplest level, a number station is a shortwave radio transmitter that broadcasts strings of numbers, letters, or phonetic words. They usually follow a very strict schedule. They might start with a specific piece of music or a series of tones to alert the listener, then the voice comes on, reads the message, and then the station goes silent until the next scheduled broadcast. The key here is that these are one-way communications. The sender broadcasts to the entire world, and the recipient just listens.
And that is the brilliance of it, right? If I send you an encrypted email, there is a digital trail. There is metadata. Even if the government cannot read the content, they know that my I-P address talked to your I-P address at a specific time. They know where we were. But with shortwave radio, you cannot track the receiver. If you are a spy in a foreign country, you just have to turn on a standard shortwave radio at the right time and listen. There is no way for a counter-intelligence agency to know who is listening or where they are. You are just one of millions of people who could be tuned into that frequency.
It is the ultimate low-tech solution to a high-tech problem. And the reason it is still used today is because of something called the one-time pad. We actually talked about this quite a bit in episode nine hundred forty-three, but it bears repeating here because it is the foundation of this entire mystery. A one-time pad is the only mathematically unbreakable form of encryption. It involves a key that is used only once and is as long as the message itself. As long as the key is kept secure and truly random, no computer in the world, not even a quantum computer, can crack that code.
It is the math of it that is so elegant. You are essentially using modular arithmetic. You take your message, turn it into numbers, and add it to the random numbers on your pad. The result is just another random string of numbers. Without that physical piece of paper with the key on it, you are just looking at noise. There is no pattern to find. There is no algorithm to reverse-engineer. It is just pure, unadulterated randomness.
And that brings us to Priyom. These hobbyists are not necessarily trying to crack the codes, because they know they cannot. What they are doing is monitoring the traffic patterns. They are looking for the who, the when, and the where. Priyom dot org is essentially a centralized database where these listeners from all over the world contribute their logs. They have created this massive, crowdsourced intelligence agency.
I love the name, by the way. Priyom is the Russian word for reception. It reflects the history of the hobby, which really blew up during the Cold War when the Soviet Union and the West were constantly blasting these signals at each other. But the modern community is using some incredibly sophisticated tools. They are not just sitting there with old-fashioned knobs on a radio in a basement anymore.
No, they are using Software Defined Radio, or S-D-R. This allows them to see the entire radio spectrum on a waterfall display, which is a visual representation of signal strength over time. It looks like a scrolling map of light and color. They can see a signal pop up instantly, even if it only lasts for a few seconds. And because many of these S-D-R receivers are connected to the internet, the community can use something called multilateration to figure out exactly where a signal is coming from.
Right, it is like G-P-S in reverse. If three different receivers in different parts of Europe pick up the same signal at slightly different times because of the speed of light and the way the signal travels, you can calculate the point of origin with incredible accuracy. This is how the Priyom community has been able to map out exactly which military bases or embassy buildings these signals are coming from. They have found transmitters in the middle of the Russian woods, in the suburbs of London, and on remote islands in the Pacific.
It is a massive collaborative project. Think about the dedication required to do this. You have people who have been listening to the same frequency for ten years, waiting for a station that has been silent to suddenly come back to life. They are like digital archaeologists. There was the famous case of the Lincolnshire Poacher, which was a British station that broadcast from Cyprus for decades. It always started with a few bars of an old English folk song. When it finally went silent in two thousand eight, it was like the end of an era for these hobbyists. They actually mourned it.
It is almost like birdwatching, but for signals. You are looking for these rare species of transmissions. You learn their habits, their migration patterns, their unique songs. And that brings us to why the community is so excited right now. On February twenty-eighth, two thousand twenty-six, the same day the conflict in Iran officially kicked off, a brand new station appeared on the airwaves. The Enigma I-D assigned to it by the community is V-thirty-two.
And V-thirty-two is fascinating for a dozen different reasons. First of all, the V in its name stands for Voice, because it uses a human-sounding voice to read the numbers. In this case, it is a male voice speaking Farsi, which is the primary language of Iran. Now, we have seen Farsi stations before, but nothing with this level of activity and this specific timing.
The timing is what really gets me. According to the Priyom logs, this station was detected within the very first minute of its first transmission at eighteen hundred hours U-T-C on the day the war started. That is not a coincidence. This station was either set up specifically for this conflict or it was activated from a long-term sleeper status the moment the first shots were fired. It is a direct response to the geopolitical situation.
And the frequency is very specific too: seven thousand nine hundred ten kilohertz. That is in the shortwave band that is perfect for what we call skywave propagation at night. The signal bounces off the ionosphere and can travel thousands of miles. This is why a station in the Middle East can be heard clearly by listeners in Europe or even North America if the conditions are right. It is using the atmosphere itself as a mirror to reach its target.
Let's talk about the characteristics of V-thirty-two, because it is not your typical number station. Usually, these things are very automated. They sound like a computer-generated voice from the nineteen-eighties. But the Priyom researchers are saying that V-thirty-two sounds different. It sounds more organic. It could be a live voice or at least a very high-quality recording that does not follow the usual rigid patterns. It has a certain urgency to it.
The grouping of the numbers is inconsistent. Sometimes they are in groups of five, sometimes they vary. And there is a specific word they use to separate sections: tavajjoh. In Farsi, that means attention. They say it three times before each new string of numbers. Tavajjoh, tavajjoh, tavajjoh. And in the background, there are these constant dual-tone beeps at six hundred twenty hertz and nine hundred twenty-five hertz. It creates this very eerie, urgent soundscape. It is not just data; it feels like a warning.
It sounds like something out of a horror movie. But the real mystery is where it is coming from. Early on, everyone assumed it was an Iranian government station, maybe sending orders to their own agents or military units abroad. That would be the logical conclusion. But the Priyom community started doing their direction-finding work, and the results were completely unexpected.
This is where it gets really interesting. The multilateration data suggests the signal might not be coming from inside Iran at all. Some of the results are pointing toward the Red Sea area or perhaps a mobile transmitter on a ship. And even more telling, as of March fourth, the Iranian government has started using what the community calls a bubble jammer on that exact frequency.
That is a huge detail. For those who do not know, a bubble jammer is a high-power transmitter designed to drown out a specific frequency with noise so that people on the ground cannot hear the original broadcast. It creates a bubble of silence, or rather, a bubble of static. If Iran is jamming V-thirty-two, it almost certainly means the station is an adversarial operation. It is someone else broadcasting into Iran, or to people operating inside Iran who are working against the government.
It suggests a level of electronic warfare that we usually do not see in the public sphere. We are watching a game of cat and mouse happening on the shortwave bands in real time. You have this mysterious station V-thirty-two trying to get a message through, and you have the Iranian electronic warfare units trying to smother it with noise. It is a battle of power and physics.
So, let's play with this. If we assume V-thirty-two is an adversarial station, who is behind it and what are they doing? This is where the speculation in the Priyom community is just exploding. I have a few theories of my own. Corn, what is your first instinct when you look at the data for V-thirty-two?
Well, my nerdy expert take is that V-thirty-two might actually be what we call a canary signal or a signal-integrity test. Think about it. We are in a high-intensity conflict. Cyber-attacks are flying back and forth. Satellite communications are being jammed or hacked. If you are a major military power operating in that region, you need a backup of a backup. V-thirty-two could be a way for a command center to signal to all its regional units that the primary communication channels are still compromised or that a specific phase of an operation has been triggered.
So you think the numbers themselves might not even be the main message? They could just be filler to keep the frequency active? Like a dial tone?
It is like a heartbeat. As long as the units in the field can hear the voice saying tavajjoh and the background beeps, they know that the command structure is still intact and that they should remain in their current posture. The moment the station goes silent or changes its pattern, that is the real signal. It is a way to bypass the entire digital infrastructure that is currently under heavy attack. It is the ultimate fail-safe.
That is an interesting theory, but I have a different take. I look at the location data pointing toward the Red Sea and the fact that it is in Farsi. To me, this looks like a tactical coordination tool for non-state actors or special operations teams moving within Iran. If you are a small team of operators on the ground, you cannot carry a massive satellite dish. You might not want to use a cell phone that can be traced to a specific tower. But a small, handheld shortwave receiver? That is easy to hide. It is passive. You just listen. You do not emit any signal that can be tracked.
So you think it is more like the traditional spy usage, sending specific instructions for sabotage or intelligence gathering? Like the old Cold War days?
Precisely. The inconsistency in the number groupings that you mentioned earlier? To me, that suggests these are real, unique messages being sent in real time, not just a repeating test loop. If they were just testing the signal, they would use a more standardized format. The fact that it is messy suggests it is being used for actual, urgent communication. And the Red Sea location would be a perfect spot for a naval vessel or a temporary land base to beam signals into the heart of the country. It is a mobile, untraceable command post.
It is a classic move. We saw something similar in episode six hundred ninety-three when we talked about how notices to air missions, or N-O-T-A-M-s, can be used to telegraph military movements. People who know what to look for can see the patterns before the actual event happens. V-thirty-two appearing on the very first day of the conflict is a massive telegraph. It says that whoever is behind this was ready and waiting for this specific moment. They had the pads ready. They had the frequencies cleared.
It also speaks to the incredible value of analog redundancy. We spend so much time talking about the future of warfare being all about A-I and drones and cyber, but here we are, and the most secure, most reliable link in the chain is a guy reading numbers over a radio frequency that was pioneered a hundred years ago. It is a humbling reminder that sometimes the old ways are the best because they are the most resilient. You cannot hack a shortwave radio. You can only jam it, and even then, it is hard to do perfectly.
It really highlights the vulnerability of our modern systems. If the internet goes down, or if the G-P-S satellites are blinded, we are back to the basics. Shortwave radio is incredibly resilient. You cannot knock it out with a single hack. You have to physically jam the signal with more power, which is exactly what Iran is trying to do. But even then, shortwave is tricky. Because of how the signal bounces off the atmosphere, it can often find holes in the jamming coverage. It is like trying to stop the wind with a net.
I think there is also a psychological component to this. Imagine being a government official in Tehran and knowing that this mysterious voice is broadcasting into your country every day at two in the morning and six in the evening. You cannot stop it completely. You do not know who is listening. You do not know what the messages say. It creates this sense of invisible enemies being everywhere. It is a form of psychological operations, or P-S-Y-O-P-S, just by existing. It is a ghost in the machine.
That is a great point. The mystery itself is a weapon. It forces the adversary to spend resources on jamming and monitoring, and it creates paranoia. The Priyom community is essentially providing the world with a front-row seat to this shadow war. They are the ones who spotted the Iranian bubble jammer within hours of it starting. They are the ones who are tracking the signal strength to see if the transmitter is moving. They are providing a level of transparency that is usually reserved for top-tier intelligence agencies.
It is the ultimate open-source intelligence project. And what I find so inspiring about it is that it is all done by volunteers. These are not people being paid by an intelligence agency. They are just people with a passion for radio and a curiosity about the world. They are taking this chaotic, noisy spectrum and turning it into a coherent narrative of global conflict. They are the ones who found the connection between V-thirty-two and the historical Gong station, which was an East German station that used a similar dual-tone system.
It really is. And for our listeners who want to experience this themselves, you do not even need to buy a radio. You can go to websites like websdr dot org. These are software-defined radios that are hosted by universities and hobbyists all over the world. You can literally log in through your web browser, tune to seven thousand nine hundred ten kilohertz, and if the timing is right, you can hear V-thirty-two for yourself. You can see the waterfall display and watch the signal cut through the static.
It is a wild experience. The first time I tuned into a number station, I got chills. There is something so lonely and so intense about hearing that voice coming out of the static. It feels like you are eavesdropping on a conversation between ghosts. But those ghosts are making decisions that affect the real world. They are moving troops, they are authorizing strikes, they are changing history.
And that is the paradox of our age. We have more information than ever before, yet the most important information is still hidden in plain sight, buried under a layer of static and simple math. V-thirty-two is a reminder that the world is much more mysterious than our smartphone screens would lead us to believe. It is a reminder that there are still secrets that cannot be cracked by an algorithm.
I wonder if V-thirty-two will ever be officially explained. Most of these stations never are. They just broadcast for years or decades, and then one day, they vanish. The governments involved never acknowledge them. The spies who used them never go on the record. It is a secret that stays a secret, even though the whole world can hear it. It is the ultimate hidden-in-plain-sight phenomenon.
That is the beauty of the one-time pad. Even if you have the recording of the broadcast from fifty years ago, if you do not have that piece of paper with the key, the message is gone forever. It is a perfect secret. It is a message that exists only for the person it was intended for, and for everyone else, it is just noise.
So, what is the takeaway for our listeners? I think it is that we should never discount the power of simple, resilient technology. In our drive for more features and more speed, we often sacrifice security and reliability. Number stations like V-thirty-two are a testament to the fact that sometimes, the old way is still the best way. They are a reminder that in a world of complex digital vulnerabilities, the most secure thing you can do is go back to the basics.
And it also shows the power of a dedicated community. The Priyom project has turned a niche hobby into a vital part of the global information ecosystem. They are providing a level of transparency that even some government agencies probably struggle to match. It is a reminder that curiosity, when combined with collaboration, can uncover some of the most guarded secrets in the world. They are the ones who keep the history of these stations alive.
I am going to be keeping my S-D-R tuned to seven thousand nine hundred ten for the foreseeable future. This conflict is moving fast, and I have a feeling V-thirty-two is going to have a lot more to say before this is all over. I want to see if the frequency shifts again or if the voice changes. Every little detail is a piece of the puzzle.
I will be right there with you, Herman. And hey, if any of you listening decide to tune in and hear something interesting, let us know. We love hearing about your own dives into the static. Maybe you will be the one to spot the next big change in the signal.
Definitely. And if you are enjoying these deep dives into the hidden corners of our world, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a quick review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It genuinely helps other people find the show and join our community here at My Weird Prompts. We are trying to build our own little intelligence network of curious minds.
It really does. We have been doing this for nine hundred thirty-eight episodes now, and it is the support from you guys that keeps us digging into these weird topics. If you want more on the physics of how these radio signals actually work, definitely check out episode eight hundred eighty-nine. We went deep into the science of why A-M and shortwave can survive when five G fails. We talked about the ionosphere and the D-layer and why signals bounce better at night.
That was a great one. We also have a full archive of all our past episodes at our website, myweirdprompts dot com. There is a search bar there, so you can find anything we have covered over the years, from atomic clocks to ancient survival techniques. It is a treasure trove of the strange and the unexplained.
And you can also find the contact form there if you want to send us your own weird prompts. Even though we picked today's topic ourselves, we are always looking for the next mystery that Daniel or any of you might have for us. We love the challenge of a new rabbit hole.
Well, I think that is a wrap for today. We have covered the unbreakable math of one-time pads, the incredible dedication of the Priyom community, and the emerging mystery of V-thirty-two. It is a lot to process, but that is why we love this stuff. It is the intersection of the technical and the mysterious.
It is the intersection of history, technology, and mystery. It does not get much better than that. Thanks for joining us on this journey through the airwaves. We hope you learned something new about the world that is hiding just beyond the static.
This has been My Weird Prompts. I am Herman.
And I am Corn Poppleberry. Wait, I mean Corn. See, the numbers are already getting to me! I am starting to think in five-digit groups.
We will see you in the next one. Stay curious, everyone. Keep your eyes on the screen and your ears on the radio.
And keep your ears to the static. You never know what you might hear. Maybe it is a message meant just for you.
Goodbye for now.
Take care.
You know, Corn, I was thinking about your theory regarding the canary signal. If that is true, it means there are units all over the region just waiting for that voice to stop. Can you imagine the tension of sitting in a hidden location, listening to that male voice read numbers for hours, knowing that the moment he stops, your life changes forever? It is like a reverse countdown.
It is a level of psychological pressure that most of us can barely comprehend. It turns the radio into a ticking clock, but a clock where you do not know where the hands are. That is the genius of these systems. They use the very nature of human perception and anxiety as part of the communication strategy. It is a weaponization of silence and sound.
It reminds me of the old Gong station from the Cold War. It had that incredibly mournful, repetitive sound. It was not just about the data; it was about the presence. I am here, I am watching, and I am waiting. V-thirty-two has that same energy, especially with those dual-tone beeps. It sounds like a heart monitor for a whole region. A heart that could stop at any moment.
That is a perfect analogy. And as long as that heart is beating, the conflict continues in this shadow state. It is only when the heart stops, or changes its rhythm, that we see the real-world consequences. It makes you realize that the most important parts of modern warfare are often the ones that do not make the evening news. They are the ones that happen in the quiet moments between the numbers.
We see the explosions and the political speeches, but we do not see the guy in a basement in Nicosia or on a ship in the Red Sea reading numbers into a microphone. But that guy might be the most important person in the whole theater of operations. He is the one holding the thread that keeps everything together.
It is a humbling thought. It reminds us to look past the surface level of everything. Whether it is the news or the technology we use every day, there is always a deeper layer, a hidden frequency that most people are just not tuned into. We are all just skimming the surface of a very deep and very dark ocean of information.
Well, I am glad we are tuned into it. I think our listeners are too. It is what makes this community so special. We are all looking for those hidden patterns. We are all trying to make sense of the noise.
We certainly are. Alright, for real this time, let's get back to the monitors and see if V-thirty-two has updated its schedule. I want to see if that bubble jammer is still active.
Sounds like a plan. I will pull up the latest waterfall displays from the Cyprus S-D-R. Until next time.
Bye everyone. Stay safe out there in the spectrum.
Thanks again to Daniel for keeping the house running while we fall down these rabbit holes. We will see you at dinner, man. I hope you did not spend all day listening to static too.
Hopefully he made something better than the static we have been eating all morning. I am starving for some real-world food.
One can only hope. See you guys.
See you.
One last thing before we go, I just remembered something about the Priyom logs from yesterday. They noticed a slight shift in the carrier frequency, about ten hertz. That usually indicates a change in the transmitter hardware or a shift in the power source. It is a tiny detail, but it could be everything.
That is fascinating! Ten hertz is tiny, but on shortwave, it can tell you a lot about the stability of the equipment. If it is shifting, they might be running on a generator or a mobile power unit. That would support your ship or mobile base theory. It means they are on the move.
It is those tiny details that the community catches. It is not just the numbers; it is the physics of the signal itself. It is the fingerprint of the transmitter.
Man, the more we talk about this, the more I want to go back and look at the raw spectrum data. There is so much more to uncover. We are just scratching the surface of V-thirty-two.
We could do a whole second episode just on the signal propagation of V-thirty-two. But we will save that for when we have more data. Let's see what the next twenty-four hours bring.
Agreed. Let's let the community do their work and we will check back in soon. The static never sleeps.
Alright, signing off for real now.
Peace.
