Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station

[Michael Grove]

 IS a large radiocommunication site located on Goonhilly Downs near Helston

 on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall, England, which is now owned by  

 Goonhilly Earth Station Ltd under a 999-year lease from BT Group plc.

 Goonhilly offer a range of courses designed for various stages of education

 and training related to satellite communications, space mission operations,

 general STEM aspects of our work, and ART as in S.T.E.A.M.

[IT] was at one time the largest satellite earth station in the world, with

 more than 25 communications dishes in use and over 60 in total. Its

 first dish, Antenna One (dubbed "Arthur"), was built in 1962 to link

 with Telstar. It was the first open parabolic design and is 25.9 metres

 (85 feet) in diameter and weighs 1,118 tonnes.

 After Centre de télécommunication par satellite de Pleumeur-Bodou 

 (Brittany) • which received the first live transatlantic television

 broadcasts from the United States via the Telstar satellite at 0H47 GMT

 on July 11, 1962 • Arthur received it's first video in the middle of the

 same day.

 [IT] IS now a Grade II listed structure and is therefore protected.

 The site also links into undersea cable lines and has also played

 a key role in communications events such as the Muhammad Ali

 fights, the Olympic Games, the Apollo 11 Moon landing, and

 Bob Geldof's 1985's Live Aid concert, and I would assume a

 precursor in his case, to [BE]ing invited to present the FREEDOM 

 initiative at the RGS last year. 

 

 

 My soul-mate Linnie’s father Ronald Arthur Yardley, who built his

 own Colour Television Receiver • in a kitchen cupboard under the stairs

 of their semi-detached house in Borehamwood • well in advance of the

 first TEST COLOUR TRANSMISSIONS from the BBC • had himself been

 offered a job at Goonhilly Down, by GPO Telecommunications, well

 before researchers started to investigate packet switching • a technology

 that sends a message in portions to its destination asynchronously without

 passing it through a centralised mainframe • but having travelled there by

 train from where the family were living in Kentish Town, North London,

 he was unable to find somewhere for the family to live locally, and so

 could not take up the position that he had been offered. Thankfully not

 long after, the doctor who was attending Linnie’s brother Terry, who

 suffered terribly during the days of the smog in London, arranged for the

 family to move to their new home in Borehamwood. When I first started

 training as an Air Traffic Controller, cutting my teeth so to speak, on the

 study of IBM 64K core-store mainframe systems analysis, as well as all

 things technologically related to primary and secondary radar systems,

 you can just imagine the conversations that I had with Ron, and it was not

 long after I had asked him for his daughter’s hand in marriage, that a

 telecommunications network protocol emerged which constituted the

 beginnings of the ARPANET, which by 1981 had grown to 213 nodes.

 ARPANET eventually merged with other networks to form the INTERNET

 and while Internet development was a focus of the Internet Engineering

 Task Force (IETF) who published a series of Request for Comment

 documents, other networking advancement occurred in industrial

 laboratories, such as the local area network (LAN) developments of

  Ethernet (1983) and the Token Ring Protocol of 1984.

 

   It was Linnie's dad who first explained to me as a teenager, what the

   difference and/or significance between a radio valve and a transistor was. 

   These teenage entries of his in a school textbook, underline the fact that he

   was most certainly destined to become a shining light for those hundreds of

   British Telecom engineers who turned up to his funeral in North London.  

  

 This 32-metre antenna is now undergoing an important transformation.

 Soon, it will be ready to communicate with spacecraft across deep space.

 ESA currently has three deep-space dishes in Australia, Spain and

 Argentina, providing full sky coverage for tracking and communicating

 with missions at Mars such as ExoMars and Mars Express as well as

 BepiColombo - currently on its way to Mercury. Future ESA missions

 such as Solar Orbiter, Euclid and Cheops will soon be added to this list.

 However, by the middle of the next decade, ESA’s deep-space  

 communication needs for its current and upcoming missions is expected

 to exceed present capacity by around half. This is why ESA teams are

 excited by the upgrade of Goonhilly 6, which will enable the UK station

 to provide Europe’s first commercial deep-space tracking services,

 compliment ESA’s own ESTRACK stations and provide deep-space

 tracking for both space agencies and private business.

.

[Michael Grove]

Experimental satellites GIOVE-A & GIOVE-B• with its NEW ATOMIC CLOCK, which IS now so accurate that ALL GPS SYSTEMS are now locked onto [IT] • were launched in 2005 and 2008 respectively, serving to test critical Galileo technologies, while at the same TIME securing all of the Galileo frequencies within the International Telecommunications Union. The first satellite to be part of the operational system was subsequently launched on 21 October 2011.

[Michael Grove]

Science seeks the basic laws of nature. Mathematics searches for new theorems to build upon the old. Engineering builds systems to solve human needs. The three disciplines are interdependent but distinct. Very rarely does one individual simultaneously make central contributions to all three — but Claude Shannon was a rare individual.

Despite being the subject of the recent documentary The Bit Player — and someone whose work and research philosophy have inspired my own career — Shannon is not exactly a household name. He never won a Nobel Prize, and he wasn’t a celebrity like Albert Einstein or Richard Feynman, either before or after his death in 2001. But more than 70 years ago, in a single groundbreaking paper, he laid the foundation for the entire communication infrastructure underlying the modern information age.
 
Having established my own initial multi-media connessione twixt Science, Mathematics and engineering, I first became aware of Claude Shannon, having already become aware of his importance to Vannevar Bush as an exemplar example of the importance of AS WE MAY THINK

[Michael Grove]

[IT] was of course Saad Al-Hilli, a 50-year-old engineer who worked
for  Surrey Satellite Technology who was among the victims of the   so-called Alps Murder Case and his extensive involvement in the successful development of GIOVE A and B that led to the ultimate success of the Galileo Project.