Ascension Island

A home away from home St Helena’s sister island, Ascension some 750 miles northwest has no indigenous population but is inhabited by a working force and their families of many of whom are St Helenian’s.
The population is about 1,100 - 350 of which are United Kingdom and US citizens.
There are five settlements on Ascension Island, Georgetown, the Island’s capital and port; Two Boats village about three miles inland; Traveller’s Hill is where the MOD garrison lives; Cat Hill is the US Base area and there is the Residency, the Red Lion and some cottages on Green Mountain.

With a pronominally St Helenian population working and living on Ascension, Saint FM in association with VT Communications is bringing Saints overseas closer to home with the successful transmission of the station on 91.4 MHz. Previously only available to Ascension Islanders via streaming audio on Saint FM’s website, private companies, and government departments soon banned the listening of Saint FM in offices, as so many people were on line at one time, and disrupting the speed of connection of the business servers.

Manager for VT Merlin Communications at the BBC Atlantic Relay Station on Ascension Island, Ian Coverdale contacted Saint FM’s station Manager Mike Olsson about the possibility of rebroadcasting the station on Ascension.

Damien O’Bey, Trainee Communications Engineer for VT Communications explains that “the idea to rebroadcast Saint Fm to Ascension Island came about whilst searching for a project for my B-tech National Certificate in Communications Engineering. It is customary for B-tech projects to be of benefit to your company once completed. It was felt that my project would be beneficial to both VT Communications Ascension Island and the community who are predominantly St. Helenian.

There is limited availability in radio stations here on Ascension; those that are available are aimed towards RAF and AAF personnel that reside here. After discussions with our regional manager Mr Ian Coverdale, he laid down the project requirements to which my project was designed and built around. The following system (which is the one currently in use) is what came about after initial designs and trials.

The system uses a PC which streams the Saint FM live feed from the internet; this is then interfaced to a SBS FM10 VHF transmitter which relays this signal to Green Mountain (highest peak on Ascension Island) on a frequency of 95.4 MHz on a horizontally polarized plane. The signal is received at Green Mountain and then rebroadcast to the rest of Ascension Island from a SBS FM30 VHF Transmitter on a frequency of 91.4 MHz on a vertically polarized plane.”