ENGLISH BAY, Ascension Island — A six-mile stretch of volcanic rock in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean is home to the BBC’s Atlantic Relay Station.
Neale Bateman

Now managed and operated by Encompass Digital Media on behalf of the BBC World Service, the stations’ six powerful shortwave transmitters on Ascension Island beam program in a dozen or more languages to some 30 million listeners in north, west and central Africa.
The company’s engineers also run the island’s power station (consisting of five diesel generators and five wind turbines) as well as a reverse osmosis desalination plant, supplying electricity and drinking water to the island’s population of more than 800 people.n the mid-1960s, the BBC built a relay station at English Bay on the northern tip of the island to transmit shortwave radio broadcasts to Africa and South America, plus a power station to provide the electricity.

For more than 50 years, the Atlantic Relay Station has transmitted critical radio broadcasts to millions of listeners in some of the remotest parts of Africa. The daily broadcasts include transmissions in English, French, Arabic, Hausa, Somali, Swahili and several other African languages, and more recently has added transmissions for other international broadcasters as well as the BBC.

The shortwave transmitters include two 250 kW Marconi BD272 transmitters originally installed in 1966 (and still in daily use) and four 250 kW RIZ K01 transmitters, which are also capable of transmitting in Digital Radio Mondiale mode.

Each transmitter can be switched to one of more than 20 antennas, which consist of HF curtain arrays beaming toward target areas in Africa and South America. Programming from London is delivered via satellite, with resilience and backup feeds provided by Encompass. The power station is staffed around the clock with engineers taking remote control of the transmitter site outside of peak broadcast times.
Ascension typically transmits around 1,800 hours of program each month on shortwave for the BBC and other broadcasters. Most of these are beamed into Africa, but with the massive footprint of a shortwave transmission, some frequencies are also audible across much of Europe and the Middle East. Although the BBC closed its shortwave service for North and Latin America some years ago, the ability to transmit westward still exists.