V32: the first new numbers station in sixteen years
2026-03-20 · EA5IYR
On 28 February 2026, at 18:00 UTC, listeners tuned to 7910 kHz heard a man's voice say tavajjoh — Persian for attention — three times, and then begin reading five-digit groups.
Members of Priyom, the volunteer group that has catalogued these broadcasts for over a decade, caught it inside the first minute. Nobody had a recording of anything on that frequency before it. This was the transmission that turned the station on.
It was the first genuinely new numbers station to appear since V30 began broadcasting from Vietnam in 2010. What it actually sounds like
The structure is rigid, and that rigidity is the interesting part.
Each message opens with tavajjoh three times, carries two five-digit header groups, then 181 unpaired five-digit groups, and finally pads with silence until it has run for exactly twenty minutes. Six of those make up a broadcast: two hours, to the second.
The 18:00 UTC transmission is the same recording as the 02:00 UTC one, sent again. Same file, twice a day.
That padding is not laziness. If messages ran only as long as they needed to, the length of a broadcast would leak how much was being said. Padding every message to the same duration removes that channel entirely.
Underneath the voice sits a two-tone signal at roughly 620 Hz and 925 Hz, repeating every few seconds — a detail that turned out to matter. Then someone started jamming it
On 4 March, a bubble jammer appeared on 7910 kHz, during and after the transmission window.
A bubble jammer is not an attack on the transmitter. It is an attack on the listener: raise the noise floor across the channel until the digits stop being intelligible wherever the intended recipient happens to be sitting.
Akin Fernandez, who compiled The Conet Project, put the underlying point plainly: the messages themselves are "immune to brute force attacks or other efforts to crack their underlying code." If you cannot break the message, the next best thing is to stop it arriving.
The scheduled 7910 kHz broadcasts stopped. On 7 March the station reappeared on 7842 kHz with a transmission running more than an hour. Who is running it
Here the honest answer is: nobody outside knows, and the people best placed to guess say so themselves.
Priyom's own analysis carries an unusually direct warning — that its conclusions are "educated works of speculation, and not facts." What follows should be read in that spirit.
The signal is almost certainly not coming from Iran. Time-difference-of-arrival work by Priyom places the transmitter in Western Europe, in a region covering northern Italy, Switzerland, western Germany, eastern France, Belgium and the Netherlands. An independent bearing taken from Paris came out around 140°/320° — incompatible with an Iranian origin. A separate analysis by IZØKBA also puts it outside Iran. Priyom's more recent multilateration narrows it further, to a shortwave facility on a US military base at Böblingen, near Stuttgart.
Beyond that, three theories are live: A Western intelligence operation. It fits the timing and the location. It fits less well with the fact that, as Priyom notes, American intelligence practice has moved away from shortwave numbers stations over recent decades — which the group says "casts some doubt" on a straightforward attribution. An Iranian opposition group in Western Europe, trying to hold contact through a nationwide internet blackout. Priyom's objection is sharp: any competent service would have found and shut down an unofficial shortwave operation on friendly soil, so if it is still running, somebody is allowing it. A psychological operation — a loud, high-visibility signal whose real purpose is to pull Iranian electronic-warfare assets onto it, and away from jamming Persian-language broadcasters that matter more.
Two odd details keep surfacing. Those background tones match the plain-text override warning that L3Harris Falcon-series military HF radios inject when they are transmitting unencrypted while configured for encryption — which, if the reading is right, points at Western military hardware. And during the 7 March transmission, Windows system sounds were briefly audible before it cut off.
Neither is proof of anything. Both are the kind of thing that happens when people, rather than institutions, are operating equipment under pressure. Why any of this still works
The reason a technology this old keeps reappearing in modern conflicts is that nothing has replaced what it does. One transmitter reaches a continent. There is no cable to cut, no satellite lease to cancel, no subscriber list to seize. Most of all, a receiver is passive: tuning in produces no record anywhere, which is not true of any messaging app ever built.
The war made the internet unreliable inside Iran. Shortwave does not care.
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FreqBuddy catalogues 314 numbers-station entries alongside the rest of the database. The frequencies above are logged and searchable — start with 7842 kHz.
Sources: Priyom.org, ENIGMA 2000, RFE/RL, The Debrief.