@5.25 Portishead Radio (GKC) chirping away in the background, along with GKD, used for from ship traffic. At its peak (1979ish) QRY 100 plus was common requiring at least an hour monitoring one or other of the aforementioned channels

Growing up in the 80s and listening to short wave hearing the voices. sounds and music phasing in and out from places like Russia, and eastern Europe always seemed dark and mystical. Like you were listening to something forbidden from places you knew very little about.

Whenever scrolling through a feed full of unenlightend, cheaply engineered sensationalism, I can always count on Ringway Manchester to provide something entertaining and enlightening. Often times about something so inconspicuous you never thought to question it, or simply never thought it to exist. Very cool stuff!

Very creepy sounds… but to me, even the completely innocuous WWV has always sounded somewhat creepy most of the time. That clock tick, when I’m in a bad mood, can make me feel as if my life is truly ticking away.

Scariest message: “This is God. Time is up.” 😳😱😱😱

So, what was terrifying?

Hardly ‘terrifying’……………..but interesting 👍

Fun thing to do: Use Gongs and Chimes as your ringtone on smartphone. Here in Berlin. And then look how other people around you are reacting when you get an incoming call. It's really scary. BTDT. Very many people seem to know that sequence. Which leads to the question how many of them might have been active in GDR intelligence service.

I was stationed in West Berlin (U.S. Army) from 1984-1987 and had a decommissioned Collins R-390 receiver in my barracks room. I was able to string up a long wire antenna and could hear these numbers stations with no difficulty. Hearing the gongs and chimes brings back memories of those days.

The "transmission for the bright child" uses the German children's song "All of My Ducklings" as a coded political message. In the first verse, "all my ducklings swimming in the lake have their heads underwater and their tails in the air." In the second verse, "all my doves sitting on the roof lift up into the air and all fly away." In the third verse, "all my hens scratching in the straw find grains, and are happy." I think this song is used as a clever commentary by those who manned the Gongs and Chines station for so many years: Our agents (the little ducklings) should now all go "underwater" lest their "asses" be exposed; the transmitting staff members (the doves) are about to "fly the coop;" and everyone (the hens) can find new jobs, which will make us all happy.

Hope that some old East German agent can enlighten us further.

I can recall listening to these as a kid in the 60s, 70s. Being a nerd from birth, I was given a shortwave radio receiver and spent hours at night scanning up and down the dial.

"All my ducklings swim to the lake. Heads in the water, tails in the air."

That final broadcast was very creepy. Great work! Thank you.

I didn't know what number stations were when I was a kid so when I heard "Oxygene Part II" on the shortwave suddenly followed by weird numbers,

This gongs and chimes are very scary!This channel is amazing,the content about rádio transmission is incredible!

I knew it would be some number station spy stuff, when I read "most terrifying short wave signal" and saw the Berlin tower in the thumb nail but I wasn't prepared for some spooky GDR chime and gongs for sure. That they didn't switched out the old tape really rounded it off. Great video and greetings from Germany :)

According to the memoires of Markus Wolf the Alle meine Ente was a code telling agents that they were no longer required - a goodbye/signing off-signal.

Lewis you've captured the essence of numbers stations for me in this one. The feeling of the void reaching into your ear and leaving a question.

It actually mildly upsets me that the ever growing advent of digital radio will end up with us losing common access to the more mysterious and interesting aspects of the EM spectrum. I remember being given my first multiband radio receiver and listening to all sorts of fascinating, squeaks, bleeps, languages and effects like phasing. Feels odd that many kids these days will never get to experience that.