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This female German numbers station had a rigid
   schedule and format. It also used a musical marker or interval signal - a four 
note tune rising up the scale: "so-la-te-do" played on
   some sort of electronic organ. This tune was aired for a five minute period before 
the hour. On the hour the woman would send
   the headings of each message to follow, for example:
   34324/05 67545/07 55433/11 34534/15
   11244/18 53466/21 32124/26 12334/29
   15566/33 12456/38 98676/41 75555/47

   The stroke symbol (I) was spoken as the word trennung. These headings were sent 
for exactly five minutes. As you can see, the
   two figure number after the first trennung symbol is "05", which indicates when 
message number 34323 is due to start.
   At five minutes past the hour there was a pause and the woman said "achtung" and 
then the first heading was sent again but this
   time the "05,, was replaced by the number of five figure groups in the message. 
For example, 34324/22 meant that 22 five figure
   groups were in message 34324.
   Example:
   
   Achtung 34324/22. Achtung 34324/22 
   11223 24566 55454 46578 25555 33367 57567 45585 34665 
   66477 58577 54888 01123 63645 58999 10122 46547 09991.

   After this, "achtung" was sent again, followed by the heading for the second message 
-67545/39, for example. As can be seen,
   the final message has a suffix "/47, which means that this message starts at 47 
minutes past the hour. Presumably the recipient
   would listen to all of the headings in the first five minutes and then not need 
to listen again until the time his message was due to
   begin if, indeed, a message was intended for that recipient on that night. After 
the last message the word "ende" was sent and
   the station fell silent until five minutes before the next hour when the sinister-sounding 
electronic tones were sent again, heralding
   a new set of headings and messages.

Schedule:
   3217 kHz at 1800, 1900, 2000, 2100
   3820 kHz at 2000, 2100, 2100, 2200

   During the summer months in Britain the station kept to British Summer Time, i.e. 
UTC plus one hour.
   The same messages sent on 3217 were re-broadcast two hours later on 3280 so if 
the first airing was missed there was still an
   opportunity to hear it. This was one of the very few numbers stations that changed 
its schedule when daylight savings was in
   effect. Most kept to the same UTC time so here was a tiny clue that the messages 
and the station were genuine. One could
   imagine that the agents involved would have a set monitoring routine somewhere 
in West German society and the schedule
   would be ordered so as to produce the least inconvenience to their routine. The 
same station also appeared during the day using
   the same format but with perhaps only half as much traffic as in the evening.

   This was the normal daytime schedule:
   5820 - 1000, 1100, 1200
   6450-0800, 0900, 1000 

(UTC times in winter, British Summer time in summer) 

   There was apparently no connection between the traffic on the two frequencies. 
Only on three occasions did I note any additional
   broadcasts: once on 3820 the woman was heard with some kind of test transmission 
at 0500 but the signal kept switching on
   and off in the middle of the transmission, making it impossible to copy the full 
text. On another occasion the station was on 7625
   at 2000 and 2100. The last unusual transmission was heard on 7430 at 2100. These 
were apparently "one-off' broadcasts and
   were not repeated.

   The great changes taking place in East Germany as the 1980's neared an end also 
changed the output from this station.
   Gradually the traffic lessened to a point where perhaps only two transmissions 
per night were heard - sometimes none at all. In
   the last days of this station the schedule became even more erratic and eventually 
fell to only once per week. Then, towards the
   end of April, 1990, the station vanished. It made me wonder if perhaps the whole 
shadowy world of numbers broadcasts was
   about to end, along with the careers of all those thousands of former East German 
agents.