“Tavajoh! Tavajoh! Tavajoh!” – “Attention!” in Persian – a man’s voice announces, before going on to narrate a string of numbers in no apparent order, slowly and rhythmically. After nearly two hours, it stops, only to resume again hours later.
The broadcast has been playing twice a day on a shortwave frequency since the start of the US-Israel attack on Iran on 28 February.
According to Priyom, the broadcast wasfirst heard as the US bombing of Iran began. It has since played on the 7910 kHz shortwave frequency like clockwork – at 02.00 UTC and again at 18.00 UTC.
Priyom is a long-running network that tracks and analyses number stations globally, using established radio-location techniques.
Over the weekend, Priyom said it had identified the likely origin of the broadcast. Using multilateration and triangulation techniques, the group traced the signal to a shortwave transmission facility inside a US military base in Böblingen, southwest of Stuttgart, Germany.
The site lies within a restricted training area between Panzer Kaserne and Patch Barracks, with technical operations possibly linked to the US army’s 52nd Strategic Signal Battalion, headquartered nearby.
That identification narrows the field, but it does not reveal who is behind the transmissions or who they are meant for.
The two-hour-long transmission is divided into five to six segments, each lasting up to 20 minutes. Each opens with “Tavajoh!” before shifting into a string of numbers in Persian, sometimes punctuated with an English word or two.
Five days into the broadcast, radio jammers were heard attempting to block the frequency. The following day, the transmission shifted to a different frequency – 7842 kHz.
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