Goonhilly Satellite Earth station

I visited BT's Goonhilly satellite earth station in August 2007. The weather was more like November than August as you will see from the pictures.

Goonhilly has its own web site at http://www.goonhilly.bt.com/

All the images are clickable for a larger version. Use 'Back' to return here.

Later in the day the sun came out and I took this picture of Goonhilly's dishes in the distance from the road down to the Lizard Point.

Outside the entrance to the visitor centre are coaches to take you on a tour round the site to see the many dishes.

The entrance and car park are presided over by Arthur, the original dish on the site. Arthur was constructed in 1962 to work with the fast-orbiting Telstar satellite and for that reason is the most agile of Goonhilly's dishes. Arthur is now a Grade II listed structure. The item in the foreground is a 'petal' similar to the segments in the main dish.

The visitor centre is welcoming with lots of displays with an educational slant for the younger visitor.

Displays are on two floors. Here is the staircase leading to the upper display area with models of satellites hanging down.

Of course, Goonhilly is about technology heritage a lot newer than most of the Connected Earth site. The key theme of the displays is satellite technology. Here the basic principles are explained.

At this console visitors can steer a dish on the roof to connect with one of several geostationary satellites and view the TV channels they are transmitting.

The Connected Earth display shows the history of telecommunications with various artefacts in small windows. This part is about telephony.

Some of the young visitors were obviously interested in old phones.

Here's a display about telegraphy, starting with Morse code.

Goonhilly is also a terminal for several undersea fibre optic and coaxial cbales. Some samples of such cables can be seen in the display case.

A rather fanciful display about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

The coach tour takes visitors round the site to see the control tower and many of the other dishes presently on site. BT has annouced that Goonhilly is to be scaled down in the future and many dishes will disappear. Eventually only Arthur will remain.

The centre has an internet café with high speed connections much faster even than home broadband. However these two don't look terribly impressed.

The café was pretty busy. Maybe it was a reflection of the poor weather outside. Appropriately enough it's called the Big Dish. Probably not a reflection on the size of portions.

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