A radio enthusiast from Northern Ireland, UK has managed to listen to a state-run North Korean radio station called Voice of Korea (VOK), according to the Daily Mail.
"With email access in North Korea sadly not being monitored as much I decided to go down the route of pen and paper," Heyburn told the Daily Mail, noting that he was anxious whether the post office would even accept a letter going to North Korea. "The post office woman didn't look at it twice, she just said ‘we don't often see letters addressed to Pyongyang' and that was it," Heyburn said.
Initially, Heyburn was unsure whether he would receive a reply from the hermit state, but he actually got the shock of his life when the station sent him a whole package full of things in return.
The parcel contained North Korean newspapers, magazines, a book by Kim Jong-Il, a personal note on the weather and even a program schedule for English radio broadcasts! And of course, as per shortwave tradition, the package included a so-called "QSL card," usually sent in acknowledgement of radio contact by the broadcasting station.
"One morning I was sitting on the stairs tying my shoes when this large brown envelope dropped into our doorway with a postmark saying Pyongyang," Heyburn told reporters. "I literally had a huge grin on my face and was going, 'it's actually arrived, wow!'. I opened it as carefully as I could to preserve the large envelope but I was also really excited to get it open."
According to the Daily Mail, Heyburn received his reply from North Korea faster than many diplomats and world leaders, who have been left hanging by Pyongyang even on the most urgent of matters, sometimes receiving no reply at all.
