Seems about right and American: pervert a dead person's reputation and personality into a cartoonish mythological character to fabricate lore for a profitable tourist attraction. Add doors to nowhere and guided tours repeating misinformation, exit through the gift shop.
PS: While I grew up in San Jose, my parents unfortunately took me on that tour once. It looked extremely staged and all about $$$ then and I was a dumb kid. It occupied a plot of land in a very busy area across what is now Santana Row and beside the original hemispherical buildings of the first Century 21 theaters that originally had massive parking lots that extended all the way to Winchester Blvd back when people went to the movies. The parking lot was only eclipsed by the nearby Winchester Drive-In in Campbell. Where Santana Row is at the corner of Stevens Creek and Winchester was the car dealership Courtesy Chevrolet.
Sure, but that would be a benefit, I would think. Most old cars come with an AM/FM radio, most cheap phones now have FM (? I don't know about AM, don't think so) and so on. So it would be more inconspicuous to listen to a regular radio than to a special station on special hardware. You don't even have to broadcast from EU, you could probably purchase some Radio Quatar Classical Rock or something :)
Radios capable of receiving shortwave bands aren't exactly rare among normal people. They're not really "special hardware". Just owning one would not be inherently suspicious.
What would be suspicious is being in possession of the one-time pad needed to decode the messages, regardless of which media those messages are transmitted through.
For the record, "numbers stations" can be found in nearly every communication medium, including the web. The advantage of using shortwave (range, primarily) are large enough that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
> What would be suspicious is being in possession of the one-time pad needed to decode the messages
Would it though?
All you need is something with sufficient entropy. I reckon you could do a "good enough" job with any plausible-looking data you have lying around on your hard disk right now. Say for example if you took a couple of sha256s of any random image you might post on social media, you'd have quite a lot of key right there.
It was once common knowledge that VHF radio ("FM") typically doesn't travel over the horizon, LW and MW radio ("AM") travel by ground wave and are regional, but that you need shortwave kit for international and global communications.
Quite how a reader on a modern technical news site is unaware of this (no, you can't send direct messages to spies half way around the planet to be received on an "AM/M" car radio) shows just how common public knowledge of radio communications has faded over the last few years.
my win11 disk shit the bed and I had the local PC guys put in a new one (wiping all my data). they gave me the the machine back with a local 'user1' admin account. so that's me now. user1. hi.
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