Cherry Ripe (numbers station)

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Cherry Ripe is the nickname of a mysterious, powerful shortwave numbers station that uses several bars from the English folk song "Cherry Ripe" as an interval signal. The station is believed to be operated by the British Secret Intelligence Service and to emanate from the island of Guam. It consists of an electronically-synthesised English-accented female voice reading groups of 5 numbers: '3-5-7-6-1', etc. It is likely that the station is used to communicate to undercover agents operating in other countries (known as illegals), to be decoded using a one-time pad.

Cherry Ripe has a more famous and much more active middle-eastern cousin, the Lincolnshire Poacher, which also uses several bars from the English folk song of the same name as its interval signal. [1] The Lincolnshire Poacher has long been suspected as being operated by Britain and has been detected as emanating from RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus. Apart from the interval signal, the format and voice of the two stations is identical.

[edit] Schedule

This schedule is accurate as of January 2006. All times are UTC, frequencies MHz. [2]

	Sunday - Friday
00:00	18.864 21.866
01:00	19.884 21.866
10:00	20.474 23.461
11:00	18.864 23.461 14.730
12:00	18.864 23.461
13:00	18.864 21.866
14:00	18.864 20.707
22:00	18.864 24.644
23:00	18.864 21.866