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How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience

numbers-stations.com

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Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience

#71

Post by sandworm101 »

smogcutter wrote: post #55
sandworm101 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. Kids. Video is certainly not film, but once upon a time was regularly recorded onto magnetic tape running over reels (google "VCR" or "VHS"). Still photography also used moving parts. Things like shutters would make audible clicks when exposing the photographic film, which then had to be moved out of position mechanically. That "click" noise on your iPhone camera is actually designed to mimic this ancient camera…

The tape deck would’ve been a separate unit and could be kept anywhere you could run a cable to. It’s clear that the poster you’re condescending to understands this.

>> The tape deck would’ve been a separate unit

In an ideal situation. In a realworld situation that means running wires through walls, not something done easily in this situation. Hiding a camera in a bookcase is easy. Secretly running wires from that bookcase to a recorder in the next room is not.

Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience

#72

Post by sandworm101 »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #46
sandworm101 wrote: post #31

>> When Filatov was at work, the operative workers infiltrated his apartment and installed technical surveillance resources for video surveillance and photography. 1977. Video equipment was VERY different then, especially on that side of the iron curtain. It would have had moving parts, motors, probably requiring a degree of soundproofing. I want to see pictures of where/how they hid this stuff because it wasn't easy…

There was a joke in the Soviet Union: - How do you know the KGB is surveilling you? - A new wardrobe has just appeared in your apartment.

In parts of china, some uighur households are assigned a live-in spy, an agent openly living with the family to monitor and report on the household's activities.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-uighurs-...

"China sends state spies to live in Uighur Muslim homes and attend private family weddings and funerals"

Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience

#73

Post by pps43 »

jacquesm wrote: post #70
pps43 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initial amplifier does not let much energy flow backwards. More importantly, there's a lot of background noise on HF bands that will mask that weak signal.

'not much' == 'some'. If you've never built a radio and tried to shield this unintended export than I can totally see how you might think this is just a matter of careful design and more shielding but it really is a lot harder than that and you will simply never reach zero to the point where even an ordinary spectrum analyzer hooked up to the input of your radio will not show the oscillator frequency as a nice fat pe…

There is a big difference between spectrum analyzer hooked up directly to the input of the radio and an antenna in a van several blocks away, with reflections and noise thrown in.

Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience

#74

Post by pps43 »

giantrobot wrote: post #69
pps43 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A directional antenna has to be much larger than wavelength. Won't fit in a van if we're talking about HF (with wavelengths measured in tens of meters).

Not[0] really[1]. Loop antennas (active or passive) have good gain perpendicular to the loop. It would be easy to mount on the inside of a wood paneled moving van with some nice receiving equipment. You park the van so the side faces the target's apartment and voilà you can listen to the mixer of their superhet radio. If your searching for receivers a couple vans driving around could triangulate and detected signals.…

You can make a small (relative to wavelength) loop antenna that has a sharp minimum, but it will be very inefficient. You want your directional antenna to have a sharp maximum (high gain) so that it can increase signal to noise ratio.

Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience

#75

Post by bigiain »

sandworm101 wrote: post #71
smogcutter wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tape deck would’ve been a separate unit and could be kept anywhere you could run a cable to. It’s clear that the poster you’re condescending to understands this.

>> The tape deck would’ve been a separate unit In an ideal situation. In a realworld situation that means running wires through walls, not something done easily in this situation. Hiding a camera in a bookcase is easy. Secretly running wires from that bookcase to a recorder in the next room is not.

They literally kicked his upstairs neighbours out and moved in there themselves. Once you’ve done that, dropping wiring down from your floor to his ceiling become trivial (at least for certain types of building construction).

Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience

#76

Post by jacquesm »

pps43 wrote: post #73
jacquesm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'not much' == 'some'. If you've never built a radio and tried to shield this unintended export than I can totally see how you might think this is just a matter of careful design and more shielding but it really is a lot harder than that and you will simply never reach zero to the point where even an ordinary spectrum analyzer hooked up to the input of your radio will not show the oscillator frequency as a nice fat pe…

There is a big difference between spectrum analyzer hooked up directly to the input of the radio and an antenna in a van several blocks away, with reflections and noise thrown in.

Have you actually done any of this? If so, great. If not, I have and it would appear to me that your experiments at shielding have been more successful than mine. And there was a good premium on being able to create a mixer based receiver that did not leak at all because discovery could have led to fairly large financial impact for the owner of the device (not quite at the we'll ship you to Siberia or shoot you level, but impressive enough to make sure we weren't leaking if we could help it).

I learned a lot during that project, especially how hard it is to make an oscillator that does not radiate. So, it got to the point where I could reliably detect the receiver from about 100 meters away, fortunately the counterparty never started out from the assumption that it would be in that particular location to begin with. Trawling for a signal is a lot harder than verifying that is is there. But if you know the modulation and the frequency the receiver uses for its mixing stage this is a very hard problem to solve in such a way that there is absolutely no power radiated out of the reception antenna. Any kind of magnetic or capacitive coupler is bi-directional. Maybe with today's hardware capabilities it would be possible to pull the whole thing into the digital domain at a very early stage and that way I can see a few options to make it 100% clean but in the analog domain I do not see a bullet proof way of achieving this.

Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience

#77

Post by pps43 »

jacquesm wrote: post #76
pps43 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a big difference between spectrum analyzer hooked up directly to the input of the radio and an antenna in a van several blocks away, with reflections and noise thrown in.

Have you actually done any of this? If so, great. If not, I have and it would appear to me that your experiments at shielding have been more successful than mine. And there was a good premium on being able to create a mixer based receiver that did not leak at all because discovery could have led to fairly large financial impact for the owner of the device (not quite at the we'll ship you to Siberia or shoot you level…

> if you know the modulation and the frequency the receiver uses

Number stations on short waves all use AM, so you know the modulation. But you don't need to know it, superhet works the same way with any modulation. You need to know the number station frequency, receiver's intermediate frequency, and guess whether its above or below.

> in such a way that there is absolutely no power radiated out of the reception antenna.

I'm not saying there is absolutely no power radiated out of the reception antenna, only that there is not enough power to reliably detect and localize, given the noise and interference from other sources.

If you want absolutely no power radiated out of the reception antenna, you can still do it. Feed some local oscillator frequency, inverted, into the antenna to cancel the remaining leak. But as far as I know, nobody bothers since some leakage is not a problem.

> Any kind of magnetic or capacitive coupler is bi-directional.

True, but in many designs there's also at least one transistor stage in the preamp, and that is not bi-di. There is some stray capacitance between collector and base, but not much.

> Maybe with today's hardware capabilities it would be possible to pull the whole thing into the digital domain at a very early stage

It is possible, but unnecessary. The last radio I built has quadrature sampling detector with FST3253 and handful of op-amps. Most SDRs also do I/Q sampling with two slow ADCs, much simpler than a single high-speed ADC.

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