Firedrake: you can find censored radio by listening for the music
2026-08-05 · EA5IYR
Somewhere on the shortwave bands right now, there is loud orchestral music playing. It has no announcements. It never identifies itself. It runs for an hour and then runs again.
It is called Firedrake, and it is not a radio station. It is a jammer. The mechanism is the interesting part
Firedrake is not generated at each transmitter site. The audio — a piece of Chinese folk-orchestral music, about an hour long — is carried on a China National Radio satellite feed, reported to originate from ChinaSat 6B.
Ground transmitters across China pull that feed down and radiate it on whatever frequency they are told to. The targets are the broadcasters the state would rather not be heard: Radio Free Asia, Sound of Hope, Voice of America, the BBC World Service.
That architecture is why it works so well. A jammer site needs no programme material, no operator making decisions, no local storage. It needs a dish and a frequency. When a broadcaster moves to dodge the interference, the jamming can follow within minutes, because moving it is a tuning instruction and nothing more. Why the music, and why no identification
Jamming does not require content. A tone or noise would technically work.
Music is used because it is harder to filter out and harder to listen through than a steady tone, and because a listener who tunes past hears something that sounds like a broadcast rather than something that sounds like an attack. It degrades the target without looking like equipment failure.
The absence of any station ID is not an oversight. Deliberate interference with another country's broadcasts is prohibited under international radio regulations, and no operator identifies itself while doing it. What it is useful for
Here is the part that makes Firedrake worth a listener's time: the jammer is a map.
Nobody spends transmitter power covering something they do not care about. Find Firedrake on a frequency, note the time, and you have found a broadcast somebody went to real expense to suppress. Enthusiasts have effectively reverse-engineered target schedules this way for years — the censorship advertises the thing it is censoring.
It is also a reminder of why shortwave persists at all. Jamming is expensive and imperfect precisely because the medium crosses borders without asking permission. There is no server to seize and no route to block. There is only the option of being louder. Hearing it
Look around the frequencies used by Radio Free Asia and Sound of Hope during their broadcast hours, roughly in the 25, 31 and 41 metre bands. When you find it you will know immediately: nothing else on shortwave sounds like an orchestra playing into an empty channel.
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Sources: HFUnderground — Firedrake, ARRL — Firedrake jammer on the loose again in Asia, Signal Identification Wiki — Chinese Firedrake Jammer, Wikipedia — Radio jamming in China.