you may have tuned into a spy agency's station transmitting coded instructions to their minions ....

[NHCraigT]

One of the Articles from the 1/25/18 ARRL LETTER:

ARRL LINK: ARRL Letter

.... Numbers station transmissions typically consist of a voice "reading out strings of seemingly random numbers," explained Lewis Bush, author of Shadows of the State, a new history of numbers stations. "These are sometimes accompanied by music, tones or other sound effects," he said. The Radio World article quotes Paul Beaumont, an associate editor of Eye Spy Intelligence Magazine, a publication dedicated to espionage and intelligence, "Voice (numbers) stations are known to be spy messages."...

... ARRL member Chris Hays, AB6QK, on the west coast, said this week that he frequently hears a CW station on 7.163 MHz sending random alphanumeric characters, each group terminated by one or more question marks....

 

[Kevin_NH]

Interest in these comes and goes, I don't think there's ever been a good explanation of the modern utility of "Numbers Stations", and many have dropped off the air (presumably it's easier to just use the Internet)

If you have a good antenna, check the schedule for upcoming broadcasts. Otherwise, you can get recordings from the Conet Project.

 

[MaverickNH]

Back in Iowa, on a slow day (picture corn not growing) we would put guys on both side of a cow pasture. Groups on one side and then the other would rise from hiding and shout “Hey”, so that the cows would look left, right, left, right, left, right, ... until,they would get dizzy and fall over. To distinguish the act from Cow Triiping, which was manually tipping a standing, napping cow, we called it Cow Spinning.

These signals are pretty much Electronic Cow Spinning.

 

[namedpipes]

Back in Iowa, on a slow day (picture corn not growing) we would put guys on both side of a cow pasture. Groups on one side and then the other would rise from hiding and shout “Hey”, so that the cows would look left, right, left, right, left, right, ... until,they would get dizzy and fall over. To distinguish the act from Cow Triiping, which was manually tipping a standing, napping cow, we called it Cow Spinning.

These signals are pretty much Electronic Cow Spinning.

Having grown up in the country, I can empathize.

 

[greencobra]

i'm visualizing radar o'reilly doing this "on a slow day."