The Frequency Hunters
Curiosity is contagious.
Community || Radio || Hope
The emails started arriving three weeks after the story published. From amateur radio operators, signal hobbyists, retired engineers, a retired army communications officer, a woman in Vancouver who ran a late-night shortwave scanning show. All of them had the same approximate shape: I read your piece. I’ve been scanning for years. I found something once that I never reported because I didn’t know who to tell. Now I want to tell someone. Elena read every one. She could not follow up on every one — there was a prosecution to cover, a book she was not writing, a station that still needed its 2 a.m. slot filled — but she forwarded the ones that seemed most substantive to a journalism professor at Portland State who had the resources and the research assistants to pursue them methodically.
The professor’s name was Dr. Amara Osei, and she called Elena six weeks later to say that three of the forwarded signals had proven, upon investigation, to be exactly what they appeared to be: pirate radio, hobbyist transmission, accidental interference. But one — a repeating signal on 88.1 MHz, originating somewhere in rural Montana, identified by a retired engineer in Billings who had been logging it intermittently for four years — was something else. She would not say what, not yet. She said: “I think you might want to come to Montana.” Elena thought about what Gina would say. She thought about what Patricia Soo would have said. She looked at the receiver on her desk. “Send me the coordinates,” she said.