North Korea hides its numbers station inside a radio programme
2026-08-17 · EA5IYR
Most numbers stations are conspicuous by design. A dedicated transmitter, its own frequency, nothing on it but digits. That makes them easy for an enthusiast to find — and it makes the act of tuning one a small confession.
North Korea does it differently.
V15 stopped transmitting around 2001. On 23 June 2016 it came back, and the return was reported first by South Korean intelligence and then by more or less everybody. The format is distinctive: the digits are read as page and item numbers, along the lines of "page 45, number 27", rather than as bare five-figure groups. Inside the state broadcaster
The unusual part is where it lives. V15 goes out as a segment of the Pyongyang Broadcasting Station, the country's own international service, on the same frequencies it uses for music and news.
There is no separate signal to find. The programme runs, and at some point the announcer reads numbers instead of headlines, and then the programme continues.
For anyone receiving it, that changes the calculus completely. Tuning a numbers station is suspicious. Tuning a foreign state broadcaster is what shortwave listeners have always done. The signal that carries the instruction is also perfect cover for owning a receiver tuned to it.
In December 2016 it went further and appeared on FM — as far as anyone has documented, the only numbers station ever to do so. It has gone quiet again
Weekly transmissions ran until 27 June 2019. After that the reported activity falls off a cliff: a broadcast in September 2019, another in November, and very little since.
That fits a wider pattern. In early 2024 North Korea shut down long-running radio services aimed at the South and cut back inter-Korean exchanges, as part of a broader shift in how it treats the South rhetorically and institutionally.
Whether V15 is dormant, retired, or simply moved somewhere nobody is watching is not something an outside observer can establish. Numbers stations are famously bad at announcing their own retirement — the Lincolnshire Poacher just stopped one day in 2008 and that was that. Why the page-and-number format matters
Five-figure groups imply a one-time pad. Page and item numbers imply a codebook: a physical document where a given page and line means something specific.
That is a different trade. A codebook is faster to use and needs no arithmetic, but it is reusable, which means it is attackable given enough traffic, and catastrophic if a copy is captured. A pad is mathematically unbreakable but demands perfect key handling.
Choosing the codebook says something about the operation it serves. Nobody outside knows what.
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Sources: Priyom — Radio Pyongyang resumes its Numbers broadcasts, Numbers-Stations.com — V15, NBC News — North Korea halts radio broadcasts to the South.