The Overseas Telecommunication Dish (OTC) is located on Brown’s Range, in Carnarvon and is just about the first thing you see when driving into town. The dish was built in 1966 as a satellite communications & tracking station and measures 29.6 meters in diameter & weighs 300 tonnes. On November 24th, 1966, Western Australia received its first satellite-transmitted television image via the dish.
The station was involved in both the Apollo & Gemini space missions and Astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous words “One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind” were relayed to the world via Carnarvon. The dish was also used for tracking Halley’s comet. The OTC Dish ceased operations in 1987 but was reactivated in 1999 by SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers.