"starman" wrote in message
...
Frank Dresser wrote:

It would be even better if they broadcast the numbers from satellites.

Frank Dresser

That would make it too easy to identify the source.


Identify the source of the transmission? Big deal. I'm sure the exact
location of all the SW number stations are well known to all the military
and intelligence agencies plus many radio hobbyists. I remember reading a
Pop Comm article by Havana Moon who radio located one of our number stations
in Jupiter Fla.

Direction finding goes way beyond the loops and yagis radio amateurs use on
foxhunts. The 1943 edition of the Radio Engineer's handbook has a nice
rundown of the technology of instanteous direction finding using crossed
loops or adcock antennas and a vector scope. Just look at the scope screen,
and see what direction the transmission is coming from.

It's not hard to imagine that instanteanous radio location can be done now.

Locating a numbers transmission to a particular sattelite might not be
particularly useful. Let's say the Chinese put a sattelite within range of
the US. Every once in a while somebody somewhere is transmitting mystery
numbers from the satellite. Who's doing it? The Chinese might be doing it
them selves, or they might have an arrangement with somebody else. An
arrangement they won't talk about. Where's the uplink? Locating an uplink
would be far more difficult than locating a SW transmitter.

And there's so much bandwidth available, they could do the numbers on TV
like the old Seseme Street countdown.

Frank Dresser