{"id":1381,"date":"2025-04-19T11:33:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-19T01:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2025\/04\/19\/agent-sonya-did-soviet-spies-really-homebrew-their-rigs\/"},"modified":"2025-07-22T12:36:18","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T02:36:18","slug":"agent-sonya-did-soviet-spies-really-homebrew-their-rigs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2025\/04\/19\/agent-sonya-did-soviet-spies-really-homebrew-their-rigs\/","title":{"rendered":"Agent Sonya — Did Soviet Spies Really Homebrew Their Rigs?"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n
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Ursula Kuczynski (Agent Sonya), 1936.<\/span>Credit…<\/span>via Peter Beurton<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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My recent blog post <\/a>about the intrepid Soviet hams who homebrewed versions of the UW3DI SSB transceiver led to a comment about early Soviet era overseas intel officers who — supposedly — homebrewed their own transmitters and perhaps receivers. <\/b><\/div>\n

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Here is a New York Times review of the book that mentions the homebrewing by spies:<\/b><\/div>\n
https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2020\/09\/15\/books\/review\/agent-sonya-ben-macintyre.html<\/b><\/a><\/div>\n

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Here’s the Wiki page on Sonya:<\/b><\/div>\n
https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ursula_Kuczynski<\/b><\/a><\/div>\n

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Tony Percy took a look at the homebrew claims:<\/b><\/div>\n
https:\/\/coldspur.com\/signal-sonyas-wireless\/<\/b><\/a><\/div>\n

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Percy seems quite well informed about radio and about how believable Sonya’s claims about her radio activities were. He uses the Morse acronym QRP, talks about Maximum Useable Frequency, discusses antennas and the relative difficulty of building a receiver. He also talks about the need for crystal controlled transmitters if the QRP transmitter was to have any hope of reaching Moscow Center. In sum, he thinks the reports of Sonya’s radio derring-do are just nonsense. <\/b><\/div>\n

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I agree with Tony Percy. I just think it would be impossible to take a newcomer, show them how to scratch-build a radio, send them to a foreign country, have them buy the needed parts, expect them to build the rig and the antenna… oh and learn to use the Morse Code along the way. I just don’t think that is possible. <\/b><\/div>\n

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Is Tony Percy a ham? What do you folks think about the plausibility of the claims about Sonya’s radio prowess? <\/b><\/div>\n

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<\/b><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ursula Kuczynski (Agent Sonya), 1936.Credit…via Peter Beurton My recent blog post about the intrepid Soviet hams who homebrewed versions of the UW3DI SSB transceiver led to a comment about early Soviet era overseas intel officers who — supposedly — homebrewed their own transmitters and perhaps receivers. Here is a New York Times review of the … Continue reading “Agent Sonya — Did Soviet Spies Really Homebrew Their Rigs?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1382,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,87,96,275],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-homebrew","category-qrp","category-russia","category-soviet-union"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1381"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1383,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1381\/revisions\/1383"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}