Small Plane In

Some of the geography this book needs does not have a road to it, or has one that a rental agency will not insure you for. The airfield outside Almaty is where that stopped being a research problem and became a logistics problem: a six-seat plane, a pilot who found my interest in a numbers station very funny, and a stretch of mountains that do not care what frequency I am chasing.

I kept the headphones around my neck for the photo, which is vanity, but the noise on the way in was real enough. UVB-76 has been buzzing longer than most of the archives I work with have existed - and before a careful reader writes in: the transmitter itself sits thousands of kilometers away, somewhere west of the Urals.

Nobody flies toward it from Almaty. What I wanted was the opposite of proximity: mountains with no electrical hum in them. Shortwave carries across a continent precisely when the ground around you is quiet, and there is no quiet like a valley without a town in it.

I will not tell you what we found, because the honest answer is: less than I wanted and enough to keep going. The plane got us in. Getting an actual chapter out of it is going to take longer.