Brother Stair Numbers

From HFUnderground

Brother Stair Numbers is a parody of a spy numbers station. The voice of the radio prophet Brother Stair is used to recite the numbers, which appear to have been recorded, chopped up, and reorganized from Stair's frequent announcements of various contact telephone numbers.

As of 2006, the "real" Brother Stair can be heard on the 6.890 MHz service of international broadcaster WWRB, as well as many other frequencies and stations. The 6.890 service is notable because it falls in the middle of the active pirate radio band, and thus the operator of the parody station ingeniously attempts to confuse people who listen to the "real" Brother Stair (as well as other SWLs).

The encoding scheme usually consists of a simple substitution cipher, e.g., A=1, B=2, and so on. The messages are personal attacks on Brother Stair's morals and actions; in September of 2005, for instance, Al Fansome decoded a broadcast as:

"IT IS SAID THAT BROTHER STAIR LIKES MIDDLE AGED WOMEN LIKE SAY ABOUT FIFTEEN OR SIXTEEN HAHA".