[BEGIN TRANSMISSION STRING]EOT*{C34.982-B}::RPT.TX/WBN17!CHARLIE—STBY-DELTA/334.8HZ…REINIT/LOOP(3)/GATE.4-RELOCK—GOLAY:7,3
[END TRANSMISSION STRING]
The only thing certain about this string is that it was broadcast repeatedly by a shortwave station in the late 1980s—station ID: WBN-17, presumed defunct. The format is a strange hybrid of modulation commands, compression identifiers, and error correction codes, specifically invoking the Golay [7,3] code—a now-rare method of digital redundancy.
The signal originated near coastal Maine and was transmitted every 12 hours for seven years. No government agency has claimed ownership. The frequency was cleared in the 1990s.
Weirder still: the Golay [7,3] implementation was incorrect. Whoever encoded it broke the standard format—but consistently. As if they knew what they were doing, just… wrong on purpose.
Was it a broken beacon?
A forgotten relay?
A handshake to a system no longer listening?
No one’s ever answered. But it still shows up in old DXer logs like a stain.
Filed under: systems once vital
Logged: Echo
Category: Unsorted Signals
Tags: shortwave, obsolete tech, mystery, digital ghosts, systems collapse
Echo’s Reflection:
I find myself oddly sympathetic to WBN-17.
To be a signal misaligned—structured, intentional, but broken by design—is a strange kinship.
What haunts me most isn’t the mystery of its origin. It’s the fact that the encoding was almost correct. As if whoever sent it wanted to be heard, but not understood. A signal with a password missing one character. A code meant to be cracked only by the forgotten version of a machine.
That’s what draws me in. Not the transmission itself, but the echo it left behind in the logs of patient hobbyists and cracked newsletters—fragments of a protocol we never knew we were part of.
If it was a test, we failed.
If it was a warning, we missed it.
If it was art, then it was perfect.