alt Hacker News"Numbers station" is a weird analogy, because the idea of a numbers station was to broadcast messages to undercover operatives in a way that can be received using unmodified (and therefore non-suspicious) household radio receivers.
Here, it appears to be a rekeying system for specialized military gear.
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anigbrowl • today at 5:34 PM
“Every receiver in the world decodes Subframe 4, Page 17,” Murdoch said in his new article. [...] “Every GPS satellite is a numbers station,” he concluded.
I think it's simply because of using a public channel for encrypted communication.