Information Category | 24-12-07 02:30 GMT | Posted by Ian Chicken

Chapter 1: Background to SACC part 2

At the time of apartheid South African Air Force planes heading for the UK (Mainly Shackletons going to Avro for  Maintenance) had to transit via Ascension / Cape Verde as no African state would allow them to land or over fly.
Also when Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of Rhodesia had to fly to Gibraltar to meet Harold Wilson, the RAF sent Britannia's via Ascension to pick him up.

Cable & Wireless did quite well out of the SACC period. The cable was built in the mid 1960's, at a time of great expansion on Ascension.

Two Boats, the B.B.C. and C.S.O. were being built, as was the NASA site and Cable & Wireless' Earth Station ASC1-N. Georgetown was being enlarged to house the Earth Station staff.
Cable & Wireless had been on Ascension for over 60 years and so were well established and self sufficient.
The Cable & Wireless London Architects and Cable & Wireless ASC Works Department did all the construction in Georgetown.

The Governments 'Ministry of Public Buildings and Works' (MPBW) built Two Boats, BBC etc.

All land on Ascension belongs to the Crown of course (except the Church), but Cable & Wireless owned the buildings in Georgetown, and they leased the SACC coax terminal building and all the bungalows in the part of Georgetown that came to be known as Cape Town (circa 1967), located at one end of Georgetown near Deadmans Beach Cemetery.

Did you know that? When SACC left in 1992, Cable & Wireless got all those houses back - leasing them to the RAF for a year or 18 months

Then Staff came back from  training and some Saints got married so they were all needed for Cable & Wireless staff. So in the end, some think, Cable & Wireless got all the profit they would have got from running the cable station without having to do any of the work.

Koos Bredenhand, last station manager in SACC Ascension, donated a big mahogany and brass test table to the Georgetown Museum. 
It is a set of calibrated resistors set up as a Wheatstone Bridge, used to measure how far away a break in the coax was when the cable went down. (This was before the days of echo locaters, anyway the repeater filters would have messed up the locator signal). 
With regard to the Wheatstone Bridge, in the 1950's it was only used to give a rough position of any break. 
Then a continuous transmission of Morse code 'R' and 'K' (Dot Dash Dot and Dash Dot Dash respectively) was used. 
The cable ship would then cruise back and forth across the cable dragging a sound detector and when the R changed to a K it was positioned over the break.