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If you've ever ventured outside the shortwave broadcast and ham radio bands and tuned around the areas allotted to so-called "fixed" stations you may have heard voices reading out long lists of numbers in either four- or five-digit groups which is typical. These transmissions are generally called "numbers stations" and appear in a variety of languages including our next door neighbor, Cuba. Transmissions in Spanish are heard most often in the United States but, in Europe, German, English and French, as well as a variety of Slavic languages are the most commonly heard. What are they? Finding the answer to this question is not an easy task. For a start, none of these stations operates "legally" which means non-licensed by the local authorities such as the Federal Communications Commission here in the U.S. And, with two exceptions, no call signs are used. Consulting frequency listings does no good either since the publications that do list such stations give their origins as "unknown". Relatively few people in the radio industry know about these stations, as this item from a recent issue of the British publication Shortwave Magazine shows: A letter from a Mr. B. Greater recalls the days in the early 1960's when Greater, then a teen, used to enjoy receiving and decoding weather reports. These transmissions are sent over shortwave in a format not unlike that used by the number stations. But he couldn't decode the data being sent in what he assumed were weather transmissions so he wrote to the meteorological office to ask where he was going wrong. The reply, from the senior signals officer, said the transmissions were German river soundings being transmitted in voice format from automated equipment! Other explanations suggested over the years include coded information for drug smugglers, lottery numbers, weather data, and commodity prices and so on.