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<DIV><FONT size=4>I should have mentioned Mincom was a division of
3M...</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV>In a message dated 7/16/2009 6:11:11 P.M. Central Daylight Time,
W4wj@aol.com writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px"><FONT
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial><FONT
color=#000000 size=4 face=Tahoma>
<DIV><FONT size=4>Mincom also had a 1" data recorder...</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>Don, W4WJ</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV>In a message dated 7/16/2009 2:24:48 P.M. Central Daylight Time,
dave@zfx.com writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px"><FONT
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial>I
watched the press conference this morning on NASA TV.
<DIV>I can't believe what I heard about the slow-scan tapes!</DIV>
<DIV>They said that the original 500 khz slow-scan data was recorded on one
track of a 14-track tape that was running at 120 ips. They even showed
one of the reels of 1" tape on a 14" reel.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>When I was at Ole Miss, we had gotten a grant from NASA, not for cash
but for surplus property.</DIV>
<DIV>We went to Huntsville, Alabama and were allowed to go through 6
warehouses (out of some 50)</DIV>
<DIV>and tag items we thought we could use. There were some amazing
things there, including</DIV>
<DIV>physical models and mock-ups for all kinds of spacecraft and
satellites, which we did not feel we could justify, but in hindsight would
have been a goldmine today! </DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Having had such success with my TRT find, I was intrigued to find some
big 1" multitrack recorders. Again, they appeared to have been pushed
over on their face by a careless fork-lift operator. The warehouse
supervisor who was accompanying us on our tour asked me if I wanted them.
I said I was very interested but could not justify them for the
University. He said, "No, I asked if YOU wanted them." I was
confused. He said his crew had "mishandled" them and that even though
they had been in good working condition he had had to fill out lots of
paperwork and they were now considered scrap metal. But he couldn't
seem to get rid of them.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>He said if I'd tag them, he'd make sure that they were loaded on our
truck when it arrived.</DIV>
<DIV>Sure enough, the truck arrived months later and the machines were
onboard, but not on any of the paperwork. We offloaded them to the
Media Center, and I ended up with them standing in my living room. I
wanted to get them working for audio but they had no erase heads. The
racks had a built-in heavy-duty bulk eraser. You got one shot, record,
rewind, play or off to storage. There were even a half-dozen tapes,
with nasa labels, exactly like the tape they showed at the press
conference!</DIV>
<DIV>(see attached pic)</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>The machines were Ampex FR-600s, and were built like a tank! It
used compressed air to all the tape guides, and had an amazing
optical/pneumatic reel servo that sensed tape tension by the back pressure
on the various tape guides. It had nylon strap belts that could be
changed for various speeds, up to 120 ips, and huge beautifully machined
brass capstan flywheels. It had shelves with analog or FM record and
playback modules and a switching matrix to select any R/P head to any
electronics module so you could mix baseband with FM. I made many
audio recordings with them and the frequency response and noise figure was
quite impressive!</DIV>
<DIV>I remember thinking it was odd that there were only 14 tracks, but I
guess that was the spec!</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>I kept the machines for many years but eventually had to get rid of
them because they were so huge and heavy and.... well, useless. I kept
a complete set of Ampex manuals for this machine.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>In the press conference this morning they said that the
original slow-scan tapes that were lost were
<DIV>on 14" reels of 1" tape on 14-track tape recorded at 120 ips!</DIV>
<DIV>The slow-scan was one of the 14 tracks.</DIV>
<DIV>My brother Alan works for NASA in Huntsville, and I have seen some 1"
14 track machines still in use there today, but they are not Ampex. I
believe the brand I saw on them was Bell & Howell.</DIV>
<DIV>I also remember having several of those big tapes, with NASA labels
that came with the machines. </DIV>
<DIV>I had the impression that they had a program to degauss and
recertify and re-use them, but I also had the impression that that most of
them just went to surplus properties warehouses and were probably sold
for scrap or destroyed.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Shame!</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>The work Lowry Digital is doing is all from videotapes that came from
the CRT rescan converter.</DIV>
<DIV>There is only so much you can do to undo those kinds of
artifacts.</DIV>
<DIV>The data from the slow-scan tapes would be much much sharper and
amenable to digital processing!</DIV>
<DIV>As one of the press members said, "You'd think somebody would have put
a big note on the reels or something saying "IMPORTANT, DO NOT ERASE!"</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>As the song goes - </DIV>
<DIV>"Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got
till its gone!"</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Anyway, I can't believe I actually owned 2 FR600s for awhile!</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Another story for the archives?</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV class=gmail_quote><BR></DIV>-- <BR>Dave Sieg<BR><A
title=http://www.zfx.com/
href="http://www.zfx.com/">http://www.zfx.com</A><BR><A
title=http://www.davesieg.com/
href="http://www.davesieg.com/">http://www.davesieg.com</A><BR><A
title=http://www.scanimate.net/
href="http://www.scanimate.net/">http://www.scanimate.net</A><BR></DIV><BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>Please
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