I first heard about The Conet Project 5 years ago, on a hot July morning after having stayed up all night, probably playing videogames and listening to music. It was a lost summer, I spent it working odd jobs that would allow me the luxury of screwing around as much as I wanted, and I did spend many sleepless nights staying up and not really doing much.
I was sitting in the rocking chair in my kitchen as my dad unfolded the Sunday edition of the paper and began to flip through the News section. He was used to my strange hours and so didn't say anything to me when I started leafing through the paper. I picked up the leisure section that allowed writers to explore, in depth, a number of features that ordinarily wouldn't receive much column space.
The cover story was about a European shortwave enthusiast who had spent years collecting sounds that he picked up on his shortwave radio. The article continued onward, explaining the notion of number stations and their purpose. Visions of international intrigue and secret spy networks sprang to mind as I continued to read about the Lincolnshire Poacher and various other innocent-sounding series of numbers and words meant to pass along sensitive information in a rather lo-fi method. The feature kept me awake and as soon as I had finished the article I had quickly run upstairs and downloaded all four discs of the project and sat through them all, scaring myself, considering the source material and its intention every time I hit 'play' to listen to a new clip. I felt satiated after going through the entire project. I fell into an uneasy, intrigue-filled series of dreams about my new discovery,
Something always drew me to the in-betweens of the radio dial, that place in-between stations where static lives and sometimes, when the ionosphere acts in my favour (usually during the late-night hours), I can pick up American AM stations from far-flung locales (Chicago, Philadelphia, sometimes even Florida). They temporarily satisfy my urge to explore, though I constantly turned knobs and then eventually progressed to the shortwave radio my mom kept lying around. Casually scanning for stations and listening to a multitude of languages kept me busy for a while, but I always searching for that illusive number station I'd get to hear live.
After years of false alarms, Evan and I managed to hear our first number station last August at 03h00, after spending evening after evening scanning the airwaves. We'd previously picked up many identification stations that airports use to broadcast weather conditions to planes and thought we had hit the jackpot before listening for two extra minutes and realizing just what we had.
That fateful night, a Spanish number station repeated numbers for an entire half-hour before going off-line. We checked in every night for a week and sure enough, it was there. We lived part of the dream, if only for a little window of time.
Think of the Conet Project as an introductory sampler, of sorts. The collection gives you a taste for the potential stations that one can stumble upon. A decade has passed since the Conet Project's inception and as such a virtual cornucopia of new transmissions have sprung up at seemingly random times. Websites have been dedicated to listing these sightings as they appear.
Click here to download all 4 discs.
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