[QuadList] FR-600s - Was Re: NPR story: Houston, We Erased The Apollo 1...

Thu Jul 16 18:11:10 CDT 2009

Mincom also had a 1" data recorder...

Don, W4WJ

In a message dated 7/16/2009 2:24:48 P.M. Central Daylight Time,  
dave at zfx.com writes:

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.zfx.com/) 
_http://www.davesieg.com_ (http://www.davesieg.com/) 
_http://www.scanimate.net_ (http://www.scanimate.net/) 

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