The Source Of The Most Terrifying Signal Ever
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- čas přidán 22. 06. 2024
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The Most Terrifying Shortwave Signal Ever
• The Most Terrifying Sh...
I made a video recently on the story of the famous East German numbers station, Gongs and Chimes. This was one of the most unnerving numbers stations with its eerie gongs and chimes sound who’s quality worsened as the tape it was sent from degraded over the years.
It was widely believed for many years, in the numbers station community that the station, Enigma ID G03 came from Zeesen or other transmitting facilities in the Konings Wusterhausen area of Germany. However, other sources I’ve researched seem to suggest otherwise.
Info and 2023 pics www.utdx.de/ and wiki.utdx.de/ - Věda a technologie
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I used to work with a guy who colleagues suspected of being an East German spy back in the day. He was a nice guy, in his 50s (so would have been the right age in the later days of the DDR). Apparently during the 80s he was very quiet and a bit of a loner. He was an Austrian national, who emigrated to the UK in 1981 straight after graduating from university. He didn’t have any family or friends, and when he was asked about his holidays, he always just told people he had gone home to Austria, but would never really say where. The real clincher for his colleagues of the day was that during nightshifts, and only during nightshifts, he would go to his car for his break at the same time every night and just sit there listening to the radio, but in 1991 stopped doing it. After then he became a lot more engaging, and even got married and suddenly started going to Spain for his holidays.
I joined the company (a telecoms firm) in 2001, so I just dismissed it as the usual gossip, but only he knows the real answer. Maybe he just really liked a late night radio DJ.
Did you ever just ask him after 1991?
This is exactly what I used to do then they took James Stannage of the air
well GDR spies never ever published their real country of origin... on real austrian spy was known in the austrian lqbt scene in the 80ties and he worked for GDR....and i think the guy you mean may have worked in bundesrechenzentrum as a GDR spy because he dissapeared from this job in 1980 .....he was a GDR spy that stole data of bundesrechenzentrum in vienna for GDR and had later the stolen data in supermarkt bags at home.....that is what i know thema austrian GDR spys ...
And they didn't think to alert the authorities of their suspicions?
@@cjmillsnun well austria was best partner of GDR and a chancellor of austria blocked investigations.... the women who alerted authorities simply was fired....the last guest of honneccker bvore he flew to moscow was this chancellor.... this spy was backed by a chancellor... wolfgang flöttl was his neighbour and latter brought to court for a financial scandal with " BAWAG" where money dissapeared...... but years later the money was found in the panama papers and it is quite probalble money from SED......and this spy forged papers to bring the money to panama...
The grainy photos of the buildings and images of the decaying sites go good with the creepiness of the radio signal. I'd love to hear from any Germans who actually cooked up that final message, I bet they were aware of how creepy their broadcast sounded and had some fun with it on their last day on the job.
@@WilhelmEley-lr4gl Interesting. I wonder how many agents went into hiding and for how long. Who knows, there may be some die-hard communist agents still laying low to this day, like the Japanese soldier in the Philipine jungle who refused to surrender for 30 years.
@@WilhelmEley-lr4gl That actually makes a lot of sense now! No wonder they were aiming it at the "augeweckte Kind"
This gong chime was a common rest (pause gong) signal at many german schools in the 80s/90s! At the change of an schoolhour, 45minutes at german schools, the chime was played in an shorter version, for breakfast and lunchtime the full chime was played. Also at the end of the break. The only difference, at the "school gongs" the chime was played faster.
That might explain the quip about the "bright child" in the final broadcast
I attended 4 schools for 13 years in East and west Germany, in the 70s - 90s. Never heard a gong.
I'm curious, breakfast? As in you guys had breakfast at school?
@@Claude_vanHab... So did I in the 70s and 80s and I can confirm that we had those gong chimes.... we actually called the last few minutes of our 45min classes "warten auf den Gong - waiting for the gong chime"
was it the exact same sequence? or just 3 or 4 notes like most gong chimes?
My goodness, this is a fine video. I grew up in the 60s. My Dad and I (mostly my Dad) built a shortwave receiver from a kit when I was a kid. My Dad installed a remarkably effective horizontal wire loop antenna around the roof of our house. I spent hours and hours listening to that radio. I vividly recall the exotic sounds of various numbers stations which were largely a mystery to me in those pre-Internet years.
Me too. Early 70's, 😮My dad bought me a Fidelity Rad 21 with LW, MW, SW, marine band and FM. Loved it! Picked up number stations, beacons, the woodpecker and all sorts of weird signals. I loved seeing what was the weakest AM station I could get, which was Radio Caroline (an Internet station now). Also could receive police transmissions on 104MHz. They had a "grumbler" to disguise the voice, but found by tuning off frequency, it made the voice clear, and I learned the phonetic alphabet from that! Ah memories.
@@JohnnyD_cmI was born in 68 & that exact radio was at my grandparents. I remember falling asleep to the mad noises, robotic voices and weird songs sung in foreign languages…….
Really appreciate the effort you keep putting into German pronunciation.
"Königs Wüsterhausen" is not easy for English speakers and you do a good job.
Zeesan is pronounced closer to English ts-AY-zahn (IPA tse:z:an)
I was about to say the same! A solid effort at the German names. The rules for pronunciation aren’t that difficult, but if I hadn’t heard my German Mum and German-speaking Dad arguing a lot in German when I was a lad I don’t think I could have managed them.
Cool you covered this one! I grew up in East Germany and tuned into this station once or twice as a kid in the late 80s. Felt *very* forbidden...
Thank you!
Never thought I would be clickbaited by Ham radio content. Keep up the good work!!
this is just the chip off the massive iceberg that is radio anamolies / number stations.. Though if you want some comedic bradcasts, look up spectragraph brodcasts of UVB-76 "the buzzer" during the invasion of Ukraine.. Phreakers were overlaying the audio spectrum with pictures of Amongus, Trollfaces and other meme images to deter Russian aggression. ITs believed that Polish, Romanian, and other eastern European national hams were responsible for the phreaking.
Same. It's a trap RUN!
not really clickbait nor ham radio tho
G03 sounds very much like my great grandmothers mantle clock. Those chimes where horrific to hear too.
She had one of those too? My father had one that creeped the hell out of me as a kid. When my father passed away and my sister wanted the clock… I’m like “take it”. My Grandfather clock plays Beatles tunes. Now as an adult I understand it was psychological warfare.
That grandfather clock sounds interesting. But yes it truly was awful. Definitely psychological warfare.
Honestly, getting hammered with the rest of the station crew and singing silly songs is how I would decommission a numbers station.
I remember falling asleep to that voice late at night when my father would listen to those broadcasts and jot down the numbers. He never did say what they were and why he did it or what he did for a job.
father was east german spy!
Your father was possibly a German Spy
You're kidding?
Erm... What?
👁👁
Unfortunately in Australia I was too far away to hear these stations in the 70s and 80s. The only scary bells i heard were in an AC DC song...
My father reckons he could pick up transmissions from Vietnam during the war, when the atmospherics were right. (Western Australia)
Hells bells? 🤣🤣🤣
Number stations are always an interesting topic. I remember listening to shortwave as a little lad, feeling like a spy as I used a notepad to note down frequencies where I'd here these stations and the times when voices could be heard.
I became fascinated with them in fall of 1990 listening to the shortwave bands and hearing a Spanish Lady calling out numbers, then later a neutral sex voice calling out the Phonetic Alphabet at midnight.
It would be amazing to explore one of these abandoned sites.
I was thinking that. I wonder if the original tape of the gongs and chimes is still there!
There are urban explorers who do. One I saw was a cottage in a field and had a huge underground complex…
@@stevemcgowen If that's in the UK, I wonder if that was some kind of control bunker of the type they built back in the '50s?
im going on a holiday to germany one day to visit a friend and I will definitely explore these sites
I wonder where is the gong recording cassette. If it were to still exist, I would give my left kidney and liver to obtain it
I first heard this in 1982 .....it frightened me as a 12 year old 😮
I heard similar gong in German supermarket once....but we digress
Great video Lewis
Thankyou for continuing to relay the coded messages Agent Ringway. We will release the zombie virus as instructed. Can you confirm the target is Farnworth? Farnworth already has many zombies. 😁
I'm from the US. I find your videos so interesting and I don't know why 😂
I was one of those kids with a transistor radio, bought with paper round wages. Scanning the LW and SW bands for anything more interesting, one of those wired ear phones helped. Our mum told me the funeral March music was "just the Russians stopping you from listening to their radio". I didn't know anyone back then who could illuminate further and now, I can't find any more info.
Still find this subject interesting and I like how you give the information in a concise manner.
Such good historical info on one of the most memorable numbers stations. Wish we still had all those from years ago on the bands. Awesome job as usual!
Great content as always!
Fantastic video Lewis!
This is great! I live in Berlin and can now visit some of these locations.
Excellent Video Ringway Manchester. Iam your big fan and I got to know A lot more about G03 from this informative video.
I think the "gong" recording originally came from a grandfather/floorstanding clock - I was in an army/government surplus store near me recently who had an old East German one, presumably of governmental/military origin in stock, which had an almost identical chime, just significantly faster and higher in pitch, so the tape was probably slowed down for playback. It made my ears prick up when I heard the chime, it really is unmistakable.
It may have also come from a different model clock with the same chime or even from a German school bell czcams.com/video/O__Dv5zkB9w/video.html
The interval signal for g03 comes from the theme music for taggeschau I think. If you watch them during the 70s and 80s, their interval signal consisted of a bell that sounded exactly like this
@@pogchampminku2535 no, Tagesschau just had a single gong followed by orchestra music
@@nillchen yeah but the gong is the exact same, it could be the same one played over and over at different pitches
Haven't really got an idea what you are talking about, but bloody fascinating and continue to watch nonetheless.
Thanks Simon!!
Superb video, thanks!
Thank's for this great video Lewis! The best from LB1NH 🙂
I loved it when I was a kid. Had it on many hours just on the background ;-) The sounds that seemed to be the big-bang tower in london on the radio with sometimes voices of another language (and yet, both not my language Dutch).
It was always one of the clearest stations to receive on my radio...
Brilliant Lewis watched your videos for a long time now mate . You have the knack for this video content and narration bud . Seriously though maybe consider some work with comnercial companies and the like , perhaps along the lines of a BBC documentary . Thats the kind of quality , clear spoken , well put together and photo depicted to create a visulisation for the viewer.
Thanks for sharing , be lucky
I listened from, the early 70s until cessation in 1990 but never found it terrifying. Maybe because I spoke German as a second language from age 8, and I had a fascination for the GDR.
Sehr interessant! The East German regime was, even by the standards of the Eastern Bloc, notoriously paranoid and had a huge enthusiasm for espionage - I've read an interesting book about just how interested the GDR was in the UK and how certain people suspected of passing information to East German intelligence are still out there today. Wonder if some of those broadcasts were intended for them?
I went to the Spy museum in Berlin a few months ago. Stayed in there for hours…..some of the things that went on…
@@martingetliffe I bet that was utterly fascinating - I could spend hours in a place like that as I'm a bit of a Cold War nerd.
@@iana6713 they had to drag me out in the end…..there were bits of old actual kit used. My pal is from East Berlin & lived in the shadow of the wall & was 22 when it came down…….he follows Berlin FC the old Stasi team. Some off the stories and plots mentioned in the Museum, he personally knew of & gave me more info that was mentioned in the Museum.
Google it mate. Berlin Spy Museum. There is some really unusual disguised bits of radio kit in there as well.
@@iana6713 there was a story board about a well known & respected female who’s background was in Education. She was convicted of being a spy and you’ve nailed it, she used to get radio broadcasts sent to her in a code only she could decipher. Well Done there Ian that’s exactly what some of the signals were being used for.
The radio tower dominates the Skyline in Berlin……
It always puzzles me why people feel they have to vandalize things like this. What you've got there is a building with some decent H/F transmitters and antenna systems -- the sort of thing any amateur would like to use. (I'm also thinking about your piece on G3CXX, the UMIST radio club's area and its sorry state -- what's wrong with these people?)
I suspect that 'these people' hated the regime when it was in power and so destroyed reminders of it when it no longer was. I would have done the same in Britain, if we had been under the control of a foreign power.
serving in Bosnia 1993 1994 1995. there was gongs and chimes at midnight on the radio also a military pirate radio station giving out propaganda this was jammed by the Americans playing abba songs on loop.
Wow, btw I sent that email with the BBC Clean Feed! M7DOJ!
Great stuff Lewis 👏👏
I lived in Germany in the 1970s and we visited the wall near East Germany. This is the first I've heard the sounds of these gongs.
Probably just an aside, but "Die Sendung für das aufgeweckte Kind" is from a joke by (West) German comedian Otto Waalkes. The whole sentence goes something like: "It's 23:45. This is the programme for the _aufgeweckte_ child." Which is a play on words, as "aufgeweckt" can mean "bright", but also "woken up". ("Du hast mich aufgeweckt": "You woke me up")
It's not a big surprise that NVA soldiers would have known that, since West German TV was very popular in the GDR -- my aunt and uncle had a whole stack of TV antenna amplifiers in order to be able to watch it. Only some small parts of East Germany were completely unable to receive western stations; in the east, "ARD", the name of one of the national FRG stations, was often translated as "außer Raum Dresden": "except Dresden area". (Also known as "das Tal der Ahnungslosen": The valley of the ignorant.)
B20
Great video. It makes me wonder,what did the recipients do when they heard that last transmission ?
In most cases, probably nothing. The basic meaning was likely this: "GDPR government collapsing. No more money. We're done here. Don't call us."
I find the situation of the people behind that last transmission weirdly fascinating...
You are stuck in a collapsing country, you know the end is coming. You get the order to shut down the (presumably important) station you have been maintaining for years. You and the comrades know this is the end, your country that once seemed eternal won't live another year. So you and the comrades get drunk, and decide to go out with a bang. Forever preserving your voice in history. You sing and then press the switch to shut it down. You know what comes next: destroy the equipment, and then you are out of your job.
nah the staff didn't destroy the facilities. the facilities actually remained in operational condition and the owner of the facilities was happy to let others inherit them but they ended up getting vandalised. It says this on the German military museum website which is where those black and white photos are from.
Very interesting. I remember listening to this on my first HF receiver in the 1970's
Yes amazing video!!! Glad the links I provided helped !! :)
This is very fascinating and cooll at the same time ❤
Fascinating. I love the CONET project too. It’s on Spotify BTW.
I wonder if there was supposed to be a recording of that children's song that was used to call all field agents home but the soldiers running the station decided to go out with a "bang"... 😂😂😂
More than likely they were having one final party before disbanding and there was some kind of inside joke. Would have been funny to those in the room but the rest of us had no idea what was going on
Thanks Lewis
Stereolab - 'Pause', from the album "Transient Random Noise Bursts with Announcements", has the voice message... eerily cool.
Excellent 👍
That singing sounded like an elementary school performance.
Great video, and impressive German 👍
Keep them coming! Awesome content. About History. The way things are going we may have to rely on good old transmitters with valves. Or as we call them tubes.👍That glow in the dark 😀
genuinely creepy, thanks ! best regards Steve
My father was in the forces, and was posted to Hamm (Germany) twice in the mid to late 1960s and early 70s , i was born in 66 and i have memories of playing with my mums massive shortwave receiver. Cannot remember the make but could of been a Sankyo ? Had lots of different bands which i remember tuning around and hearing a cacophony of dozens of these strange noises when she wasn’t listening to the world service, thinking back, this must of been around the peak of cycle 20. Amazing memories. Lewis, how about an article on the icom pcr 1000 we used with an OKI 900 mobile phone.
Lewes Sir, you are a gentleman and a legend
I appreciate that!
I've just noticed that I spelled your name as Lewes which is a local town here in Sussex. Entschuldigung :-) @@RingwayManchester
Love this
The woman reading the numbers sounds exactly what a Bond villain should sound like. "You vill die Mister Bond!"
Very interesting. I'm not in depth as you are. My interest came from a Regentone vacuum tube radiogram given to me by my grandparents. It covered several bands. I stringed a wire aerial across our 1/3 acre garden and tuned into all sorts of fascinating stuff.
Great video. Nice German pronunciations
Glad you think so!
As German all these broadcasts are really interesting to me! Do you have more of them?
an awesome channel RM - well worth the time investments.
The gongs an chimes sound like the back beat from many scarfolk videos 😂
Hearing Portishead's GKC transmitter on that last recording brought back memories, I spent many hours waiting my turn with them over the years, it was a good station though.
GKC coastal station CW I.D. towards the end!
One interesting bit of background information about the 09/05/1990 date for the shutdown.
In general, late April/early May was when a lot of East German services simply gave up. It was the same period when customs officers largely vanished from the inner-German border (passport control still remained, however), and while I've never found anything conclusive, I'm pretty sure there must have been a government order to finally shut down all these activities after the March 1990 elections.
The interesting question would be exactly what was being transmitted after the election up until the shutdown.
It's cool to see the inside of the numbers stations. A lot of equipment, way to complicated for me to understand.
I like to know how many harmonics those bells and chimes made in the rest of the band, must be huge. I've done it with test tones back in the 70s and got tons of harmonics without a serious filter, hehe. Tones and chimes travels further than voice. On low power, but I assume this wasn't the case here.
I remember bongs in my younger days lewis
😂😂😂👍🏻👍🏻
The "alle meine Entchen" Song sounds like an intro of a new Rammstein Song....
So I have a question that might be outside the scope of your channel.
I'm really interrested in knowing what's inside the Berlin Fernsehturm, besides the revolving restaurant and the observation deck and such. I've been inside the tower many years ago and ever since, been wondering what elses is up there. I've tried searching for it myself and know that at one point, there was a television relay station or something similar but besides that, I havn't been able to find much more information, let alone any images/drawings of its interior.
A friend of mine operates a small ISP in Berlin, and actually rents antenna space on the Fernsehturm. He took me up there once, to the cylindrical structure on top of the ball. It's nothing surprising really, just a few floors with a spiral staircase, a few racks with typical ISP stuff, and open antenna platforms to the outside. Standing out there in the open air is a bit scary at this height!
There must be a TV transmitter somewhere, but it's modern and low power (for digital TV), and I didn't get to see it.
The rest of the antenna is just a hollow metal tube with a ladder in it. Once a year, someone climbs up all the way to the top, for maintenance of the weather station that sits right at the tip.
Very interesting stuff!
Do you know what the CW signal in the number station recording is? Something like "DE GKC" which could be a call sign.
I think it’s Portishead radio
GKC was Portishead Marine Radio I believe...
@@kartwoodYes you are correct!
The code afterwards 7:30 or so that was part of some is pretty badly spaced message
Funnily enough the very last bit of code at the end was a prosign which means “message verified”
FYI a prosign is usually made of two characters sent without a character space. Like which means new line / end of section and sent - . . . -
We should keep this SW sites up and running. Satellites and their owners are unreliable when it comes down to it….
Sehr gut.
is there a website where i can download audio of some of these transmissions ? .. thanks
Could the site near Bernau you are looking for be the former "Großfunkstelle Nauen"? Its really not close to Bernau, but it is still in the North of Berlin
That is hands down the creepiest sounding numbers station ever.
the voice is actually eerily similar to another german number station, i forgot its name. it's featured in the game "signalis"
In the sixties I used to hear the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth played on timpani.
I don't know... do you think
- the Stasi advised its spies via NVA (army) stations?
- the NVA secret service had spies abroad (independent from HVA/Stasi) that they needed to inform via NVA antennas?
- the Stasi needed to use a civilian radio station (Königs Wusterhausen) although they had own sites (Wernsdorf) and NVA barracks nearby?
🤷♂️
The Stasi had its own number station, called G08. This is the one that was actually located in Zeesen, near Königs Wusterhausen. NVA just had their separate network of spies.
Idk why but the chimes and gongs remined me of the fnaf 4 grandfather clock
I find it fascinating that given the length of time since these stations were most actively used no one has come forward with knowledge of the kind of operations and assets these were being used for. Someone in the community must know something…for example were there specific types of asset listening out for these messages…commercial espionage for example through civilian assets or sleeper cells and what those assets were likely tasked with and so what in the more recent past were those assets listening out for.
Could I trouble you for the global coordinates for the woodpecker antennas?
i like the cw under the number station transmission . i love swl and amateur radio
That was DE GKC one of the old costal stations I assume
Hello Ringway, tonight (01 dec 2023) I'm getting some musical chimes at 243 kHz from Kalundborg Denmark... they are scheduled to stop transmistting on 31 Dec. 2023. You know anything about this station? They XMIT with 50 kW power and I'm getting them here in Normandy, 1100 km away... Cheers!
That is a very strange "final broadcast" fot a numbers station
It's funny that despite the annexation of the DDR to West Germany, Germany (now united) does not declassify this data.
have you dug through CIA released declassified documents. The Czech stations showed up un declassified docs, so would expect that East German stations would also be declassified as well.
Are the ciphers used by East Germany still classified or can old employees finally spill the beans?👀
Also could the children's song be some kind of stand-down signal? 🤔
I remember hearing this one.
Are there any numbers stations that can be, or could have been, heard in Southern California? Videos like this are interesting but make me feel like I'm missing out on something cool. lol
HM01
I heard some in So Cal in the late ‘70s before I moved away.
I really enjoy this channel. My Grandpa was a signals and intelligence officer in WW2. Wish he was still around. I would love to be able to talk with him as an adult. I was still a young boy when he passed on. Never enough time in life. Thanks for your stellar shows. I don't miss one.
Nah the Swedish Rhapsody was creepier, a disorded warped tape of a musicbox playing the folk song before its message and after its message.. Maybe the final broadcast of this station was the newly united German soldiers rejoicing drunkenly that the years of Communist oppression are over.
Those working for the East German army were probably not so happy about it because they had been selected for being true to the party line, besides their employer ceased to exist.
I remember picking up number stations when I was kid. The robotic sounding voices …😖😖😖 gave me the creeps. I especially remember the Lincolnshire poacher. Strange times
I remember hearing a woman repeatedly saying “Acht Seben” on my Amstrad multiband …roughly 1982 (I was 14)
(I wonder who else had one of those ? I wanted a Tandy/ radio shack Dx-300, in the end I got a Sony ICF2001D
Respect for your german speaking 👍
Königs Wusterhausen has a beautiful coat of arms!
I can't find any info on those KN-1E or KN-5E transmitters online. Anyone have a link?
Am I the only one having number stations as ringtones on my phone? 😁
I'm so going to do that. I've actually got one mixed with Stranger Things that I got via the Zedge app.
Yes
ill do that too nice idea
Whair can i find pictures or video of the yellow bulding with grfity and tower today looks like cool place
I do not understand any of this though I am very much intrigued and would like to learn more. I have a question someone mulight could answer. I saw in a movie 8-9 years ago a scene where a woman was in a cabin in the woods and was sending messages using her old computer to someone else with a like set up. It was like texting over the computer without internet using old technology. She was able to warn the one she was texting unbeknowing to her captors because they didnt think about her being able to use an old computer to do such. Does anyone remember the movie or better yet how she was doing such?
Have you ever done anything about Cheadle C.S.O.S (formerly RAF Cheadle) in Staffordhire ? I grew up im Cheadle and was facinated by all the ariels and atmoshpere of secrecy.
No but I’ll look into that
Seriously
These East German transmissions are super hard to understand even as a German