A post to the Spooks email list recently shed some light on the announcement. The post stated that a Mr. Toru Yamashita of the Asian Broadcasting Institute says that the message is a request for listeners to send letters to them either via email or regular mail. The email address is [email protected], and the postal address is P.O. Box 12587, Taipei, Taiwan. Mr. Yamashita reportedly sent an email to the station and received a reply.
I guess we don't need any more proof that this station is located on Taiwan, as had been generally believed.
What is interesting is that this station has been sending encoded messages for years, and now they are requesting letters from listeners. It makes me wonder who they think is listening? Are they interested in hearing from their own spies, Chinese intelligence, or us numbers listeners? I doubt anyone else ever pays much attention to this station. Could it be an attempt to appear legitimate? Doubtful, since Chinese intelligence and other intelligence agencies are surely aware of what the station is used for. The station is also not on any ITU allocated frequencies.
It also makes me wonder if they will send out QSL's. OLX from Czechoslovakia used to send out QSL's for reception reports sent to the mailing address listed for it in old ITU lists, so it's certainly unusual but not impossible to QSL a spy numbers station.
I'm planning an experiment to try to QSL New Star, and even see if they will answer a few questions for this column. I'm optimistic that they will reply, but doubtful they will answer all the questions I can think of asking them. The results will follow in a future column.
New Star is active daily almost every half hour on the following frequencies: 8300, 8375, 9725, 11430, 13750, and 15388. I usually can only hear the station on 8300 and 13750. The best times to catch the station here in North America is from around 1000-1400 UTC.
The New Star numbers station is a favorite of mine because it is the first numbers station I ever heard. I used to hear it all the time while at Clark Air Base in the Philippines back in 1990-1991. At the time I knew what numbers stations were, but didn't realize that I was hearing one. I only heard it on 8300 kHz, and it always had a very strong signal with an antenna beamed north.
If you QSL New Star, or even send them an email and get a reply, I'd like to hear from you. Please let me know what they say, and I'll share it here in this column.