Maglev to Shambala

Today’s dispatch is about radio, but before we dive into that, there are two things I’d like to clear up:

One: In an update to my last installment, I’d like to say that the print shop goldfish is doing quite well. He seemed to be kind of lonely, though, so I picked up another one to keep him company. Hopefully they’ll like each other, and maybe they’ll even breed – although I have never actually heard of goldfish raising young, and I am unable to shake the feeling that they don’t. My theory is that they simply arise asexually when the pet shop owner sprinkles goldfish spores into the tank.

All is well, though, despite the fact that none of you responded to my earnest plea for donations of resources and funds. Honestly, dear readers! What am I to think when two Print Shop employees are left unaided in their desire to raise fish in shelter from the cruel world? Shame on you!

Two: Without getting into the technical swamp of it, a key thing to remember today is that certain radio frequencies travel through the air more effectively than others. Consider UV light, a radio wave we’re all familiar with. While it bounces off ozone, it travels just fine through regular air. This is rather concerning, because UV light also penetrates skin, where it plays total hell with DNA. This is why that ozone envelope that used to shield the whole earth needs to be repaired.

However, water also has a certain level of radio permeability – a low one, in fact. This leads me to the conclusion that the goldfish, shielded from UV rays by the water, may actually outlast us all – at least, as long as we leave the canister of Fish Flakes within flopping distance of the tank before we die of radiation sickness.

Ready? Let’s begin!

A Vague History of Radio

Guglielmo “Googy” Marconi is arguably radio’s first hero, experimenting with broadcast transmission and reception. History has, alas, lost the name of whoever Caller Number One was.

A.M. radio spread quickly throughout America in the 1930’s. Radios of the age were furniture, not appliances: I picked one up at ReCycle North in Burlington and it’s bigger than my microwave. Made of wood, Bakelite, and brass, it actually has an open back, so the owner can reach in and replace any of the vacuum tubes if they burn out.

F.M. radio was a later arrival, and I’ve seen another radio, smaller and made entirely of Bakelite, that featured F.M. as a newer, patented system. F.M. stereo remained the last major “wow” moment in workaday reception. That is, if you listen to regular radio. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

 

Derangement for the Masses

The JSC Library owns the 2000 edition of a text called “The Broadcasting and Cable Yearbook,” which is fascinating. It lists all the radio and TV stations in the US, sorted variously by region, call-sign and broadcast frequency. They also (and this is priceless) sort by genre, so you can actually find where, say, to look for polka.

I actually had a radio program for awhile, right here on WJSC. In today’s genre-segregated world of music radio, I was a horrible, unnatural anomaly. Over the previous year I had amassed a variegated and intimidating collection of records from thrift shops. I shoved hit after arcane hit onto the airwaves; big band against rock against Hungarian folk music. In 20 years the aliens are going to show up with tapes of my productions and frantic cries of, “What the hell was that!?”

 

There are people far more disturbing than I on the radio, however. And they aren’t listed in the Broadcasting and Cable Yearbook.

 

Radio Nowhere

A.M. and F.M. occupy only a small portion of the broadcast spectrum, with other parts allocated to such things as television, cell phones, airplane communications, X-rays, Wi-Fi, and visible light. Long since forgotten by normal people are the various bandwidths allocated for ham shortwave.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about ham radio is how eerily unregulated it is. You can hear operators talking to each other (a ham license isn’t nearly as hard to get as a regular radio license is), the blips and bleeps of telefax transmissions, and, sometimes, the numbers stations.

Numbers stations are stations broadcasting short, cryptic, repeating phrases. Those who watch “Lost” will be familiar with this, because the show features such a station. However, I found out through Wikipedia (“The World’s Largest Source of Potentially Accurate Information”) that such stations do exist. And then I was directed to an archive of recordings from them.

The link was to http://irdial.hyperreal.org/ (scroll down until you find the Conet Project), which lists broadcast clips of the transmissions of various such stations. It also includes the creepiest pamphlet I’ve ever read, detailing such stations, and the oddest fact of all: Virtually nobody has ever actually admitted to operating one. They are looping signals from nowhere.

Their intended targets are equally nebulous. The guess of the guy who wrote the pamphlet was that they are for spies, and the transmissions are encoded vehicles of information, made manifest in pitched tones, snatches of music, and weirdly empty voices. The voices are hands-down the creepiest. My ‘favorite’ is a loop, read in English, by a woman who sounds like she’s about twenty and doesn’t enjoy doing this but is concentrating very hard to make sure she does it right. It starts with a looped sequence of numbers – “3, 2, 8… 4, 2, 3, 6, 0, 8, 9” – that turns into a tone/rumble handoff that goes a few times and gives way to many, many more numbers, punctuated only once (“I say again”) and finally terminating with “end”.

Once you shake the inexplicable chill you get from listening to stuff like this, you start to feel bad for the spies who have to listen to this day after day. Surely they must wish they had something less tedious to do other than transcribe code and sit at home, fidgeting with their explosive pocket change and x-ray monocles, waiting for Agent 243L to show up.

The good news is that I have a plan. I say again. What I’m going to do once I have my own private island (which may or may not be a former republic) is to set up my own alternative-broadcasting spy station. It’s going to play
an endless loop of “The Song That Never Ends”.