Basic Trope: A short-wave radio station that plays sequences of numbers, letters, or other sound bytes with bursts of data meant for spies or government agencies encoded in them.
- Straight: The radio station "WTF" broadcasts the melody of the song "Yankee Doodle", followed by an automated female voice counting to 10, about once every hour.
- Exaggerated:
- WTF broadcasts on several different frequencies, and each time it broadcasts something different. (A different number sequence, phonetic letters, combinations of letters and numbers, a clip from a popular TV show, a melody, sound effects, etc.)
- The message is sent via Podcast, not conventional radio.
- Downplayed: ???
- Justified: It's a way of getting bursts of encrypted data to spies, or to government agencies, without the risks that, say, broadcasting them over the Internet would use. Long-wave radio is used (as opposed to AM/FM radio) to get the encoded message out over a long distance.
- Inverted: WTF plays only music, and is either a regular AM radio station or a regular FM radio station.
- Subverted:
- WTF plays Nothing but Hits all day long.
- WTF uses AM or FM radio.
- WTF turns out to be a hoax perpetuated from someone's garage.
- WTF is merely testing its signal quality in preparation for going live next month.
- WTF's numbers are being sent by a clandestine agency, but actually have no meaning as they are just decoys meant to trick other organizations listening in into wasting time and money on decoding nonsense.
- Double Subverted:
- During the day, at least. At night, the station switches frequencies and broadcasts numbers, letters, and other gibberish with static in between.
- It's used for this purpose, because anyone who actually needs the data is located nearby.
- Alternatively, it's used for Subliminal Messaging.
- The government takes it over, after throwing Bob in federal prison.
- It used to be a numbers station back in the days of the Cold War, however.
- The agencies are able to determine that WTF's disinformation traffic increases whenever its parent agency has certain highly important operations going on, which in a way is a Revealing Cover-Up.
- Parodied:
- The spies (or maybe a Conspiracy Theorist with too much time on his/her hands) decode the message, and it's a Take That! at the audience, or a Shout-Out to the writers' previous work.
- Bob fiddles with the radio on a road trip, picks up one of these stations, and finds the effect of the automated voice reading off the numbers to be soothing as he drives down long, lonely roads.
- Aliens pick up the message, and (thinking it's another music station) say, Who Writes This Crap?!
- The decoded message turns out to be a reminder to buy milk, or something else silly.
- One of the spies tunes the radio to a music station explaining that, "This music sucks!" The other spies agree with him.
- The numbers are Leet Speak.
- The random numbers turn out to be a Bingo game.
- Zig Zagged: Sometimes WTF plays Nothing but Hits, sometimes it broadcasts secret gibberish. Sometimes it's on a long-wave frequency, sometimes a short-wave.
- Averted: The station does not broadcast gibberish, or secret codes.
- Enforced:
- Spy Fiction
- A book written by and for Conspiracy Theorists about how Big Brother Is Watching our every move.
- Lampshaded: ("Yankee Doodle" melody) One...Two...Three...Four...(and so on)...static
- Invoked: The government of Tropestan wants to get a secret message out to its spies.
- Exploited: Enemy spies try to decode the message before its intended recipients do.
- Defied: The government of Tropestan feels that this is obsolete technology and uses the Internet instead.
- Discussed: "So, last night, I was chatting with Alice over the HAM Radio, and I accidentally picked up the strangest thing. It was a little bit of that "Yankee Doodle" song, followed by some computer chick reading off numbers."
- Conversed: "You picked up one of those spy radio stations."
- Played For Laughs:
- The numbers station is given the same treatment by the spy protagonists as having a beeper or dial-up modem.
- The code is extremely easy to decode and it's a Running Gag to encounter people who did.
- The numbers station mixes the numbers with a loop of Nickelback songs.
- Played For Drama: The numbers station is one of the story's ongoing mysteries, and once the heroes decode it, they discover that the multiple atrocities the Sinister Spy Agency has ordered, including their upcoming assassination…
- Played For Horror:
- The numbers station is a Brown Note.
- The numbers station is the main means of communication of some kind of Digital Abomination.
- The numbers station broadcasts Trigger Phrases for sleeper agents and the cast discovers the hard way that there are some of those among them when they suddenly activate and try to kill them all.
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