19 May Big Brother's listening

It seems one of the most important functions of Ascension Island is to watch and to listen. It is home to a BBC World Service Relay station; the position of the island at 8°S and 14°W makes it an ideal site for short wave broadcasting to Africa and South America. It was established in the 1965 and has it's own power station. Surplus power is shared with the island, but if there is a problem with output BBC radio has priority claim. The generated power also runs the water desalination plant. Radio transmitters require lots of pure water, more pure than drinking water, for cooling the equipment. We were told the cost of producing water on a dry island is huge.

 

modern automatic transmitters

original 1965 transmitters

cables to the arrays

Everything is imported. Fuel is delivered in tankers and a floating pipeline is moved by barges from its at rest place adjacent to the yacht anchorage to the tanker and the other end moved to the pier head. While were here we watched a tanker off load 8,000,000 litres of aviation fuel through the pipe. It should have taken a day, but there were complications and the tanker stayed longer. During this time it was a free ferry ride for us one more.

It is reputed there are many 'secret squirrels' listening through their aerials. Ask these people what their job is and they will tell you they are a cleaner! Near the anchorage is a large white golf ball managed by the US. The US maintain an air base on the south side of the island and next to the Wideawake runway; at 4km the second longest runway in the world. It was extended to 4km to be the alternative landing site for the space shuttle.

Wideawake airfield

When NASA was sending rockets in to space they had a base on Ascension far away from anyone on the east end of the island. We drove around the site and found it completely abandoned.

On the north side of the island is the working European Space Agency's centre with their two satellite dishes.

Ascension may be small, but it is a very important, and highly guarded listening station strategically placed in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. Almost every high point has either a satellite dish or a crop of aerials popped in the top.

During the Falkland conflict it played a key part in operations; ships coming from the UK and Mediterranean bases stopped here to refuel. For a short period it was the busiest airport in the world.

Today the Americans have a weekly flight from Florida and the Brits an RAF plane which comes in from Cape Verdes and continues on to the Falklands. British flights used to come from Brize Norton. However, the story retold is a large American plane made a bad landing and damaged the runway making it too short for the larger, long range planes to land. Mid sizes only now to Verdes where personnel swap to a commercial carrier for onwards to UK.

US airbase

European Space mission

They may tell us all these listening devices are standard stuff, but if you want to visit Ascension you have to apply for a visitors permit in advance and if you happen to be a Chinese, Cuban, Russian, Iraqi passport holder then no permit is issued. 
An island of secret squirrels hidden in full sight in the middle of a large ocean?