[QuadList] FR-600s - Was Re: NPR story: Houston, We Erased The Apollo 11 Tapes

[Dave Sieg]

I watched the press conference this morning on NASA TV.I can't believe what
I heard about the slow-scan tapes!
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.

When I was at Ole Miss, we had gotten a grant from NASA, not for cash but
for surplus property.
We went to Huntsville, Alabama and were allowed to go through 6 warehouses
(out of some 50)
and tag items we thought we could use.  There were some amazing things
there, including
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!

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.

He said if I'd tag them, he'd make sure that they were loaded on our truck
when it arrived.
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!
(see attached pic)

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!
I remember thinking it was odd that there were only 14 tracks, but I guess
that was the spec!


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.

In the press conference this morning they said that  the original slow-scan
tapes that were lost were on 14" reels of 1" tape on 14-track tape recorded
at 120 ips!
The slow-scan was one of the 14 tracks.
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.
I also remember having several of those big tapes, with NASA labels that
came with the machines.
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.

Shame!

The work Lowry Digital is doing is all from videotapes that came from the
CRT rescan converter.
There is only so much you can do to undo those kinds of artifacts.
The data from the slow-scan tapes would be much much sharper and amenable to
digital processing!
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!"

As the song goes -
"Don't it always seem to go  that you don't know what you've got till its
gone!"

Anyway, I can't believe I actually owned 2 FR600s for awhile!

Another story for the archives?


-- 
Dave Sieg
http://www.zfx.com
http://www.davesieg.com
http://www.scanimate.net
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