Four of Us, and at Least Five Streams

I've spent two weeks doing the least glamorous work of my life: emailing strangers.

When I posted about the lighthouse on the 10th, I said I'd shown the logs to two people I trust and left it there. Time to stop being coy about it. If this goes the way I think it's going to go on the 3rd, I want the record to show who did the work, and I want it to show it beforehand, not after.

So. Here's the problem, and here's who's helping me with it.

The problem

The transmission out of Kingsmouth Lighthouse isn't one signal. It's five or six streams, each aimed somewhere different, each carrying a piece. I've said that already. What I haven't said is what it means in practice, which is this:

I cannot record this by myself. Nobody can. That's the entire point of how it's built.

Whoever set this up in 2012 did not want one clever person with a good antenna to be able to sit down and listen to the whole thing. They wanted it to require a group. Which is either the most thoughtful piece of design I've ever encountered, or the most effective way ever invented to make sure a message never gets heard.

I've been assuming thoughtful. Ask me again in a fortnight.

The people

ct2ahw — Rui Bettencourt, on the coast near Peniche, Portugal. Licensed since he was fifteen, which by his own account was "a very long time ago, and my mother is still annoyed about the roof." He was one of the two I mentioned. He went through my logs line by line and came back with the thing I'd missed: the burst spacing isn't random, it's reserved. There are gaps in it shaped like the other streams. He describes it as "a table with places set for people who haven't arrived."

He also told me, very politely, that my equipment isn't good enough and he's right.

la_pescadora — Valentina, in Valparaíso, Chile. She has been archiving numbers stations for nineteen years and has, at a conservative estimate, heard more strange radio than everyone reading this blog put together. I sent her the 10 June capture without telling her where it came from or what I thought it was, because I wanted to know what she'd say cold.

What she said cold was: "This is not a numbers station. This is somebody speaking very slowly to a room they can't see."

I have not stopped thinking about that sentence since.

es5tk — the radio society at the university in Tartu, Estonia. Kertu Sepp answers the email, and I get the strong impression that Kertu answers all the email. They have a proper array, students who will happily sit up all night for the novelty of it, and — critically — no connection to me, this blog, or anything I've written. They came to this because somebody forwarded them the post and they thought it sounded interesting.

Kertu's first message to me was four words long: "We can hear something."

What we're doing on the 3rd

RECEIVER SCHEDULE | 03 JULY 2026 | ALL TIMES UTC

17:30   All stations recording. Continuous. No gaps.
18:00   Predicted activation.
18:30   Earliest stand-down. Later if anything is still running.

KINGSMOUTH, ME (US)     me
PENICHE (PT)            ct2ahw
VALPARAISO (CL)         la_pescadora
TARTU (EE)              es5tk

UNCOVERED: East Asia. Oceania. Anything in that half of
the map at all. If that is where you are, please get in
touch. Today, not on the 2nd.

Four of us, and at least five streams, probably six. You do not need to be good at maths to see the shape of that.

I've asked everyone to do one thing that I want to explain, because it's going to look paranoid and it is:

Hold your recording. Don't post it.

Not to me, not publicly, not to a Discord, not anywhere. Keep it, back it up somewhere that isn't the machine you recorded it on, and sit on it until we've all got something to compare. If this turns out to be nothing, we've lost a Friday evening. If it turns out to be what I think it is, then four separate people quietly holding four separate pieces is a much harder thing to make disappear than one blog with everything on it.

I've had my room searched once already this year. I'd rather not find out what the second time looks like.

And if you're new here

You don't need a licence, a rig, or the faintest idea what any of the above means. You need a receiver, a recorder, and three hours on a Friday. Rui has been extraordinarily patient with people who are starting from nothing, and if you email me I will put you in touch with him, and he will be patient with you too.

There are no prizes for this. Nobody's paying anybody. The only thing on offer is that in fourteen years' time somebody might be able to say what actually happened here, and that will be because four or five strangers who have never met agreed to press record at the same moment.

That'll do me.

— Jenna

The spiral remains.