[QuadList] Rebuilding RCA TR-600s - Success

Thu Sep 10 14:06:25 CDT 2009

Well.excitement abounds.

We now have the machine back into good working order.  It is producing
really nice looking pictures.very stable.no noticeable banding on
output.boy, it feels good (I hope I am not speaking too soon.

Ok.funny story with this.  We have the quads in a different building from
our main office.  It isn't the best location, but it is secure.  It is
actually a museum, mainly consisting of broadcast hardware (old studio
cameras, tower lights, audio equipment, etc.) from Cincinnati's broadcast
past.featuring some quite famous people (Ruth Lyons, Marty Breneman, Nick
Clooney.).  Anyway, they are rebuilding this building.almost literally from
the ground up.  We showed up on Tuesday  and hit the power for our air
compressor.nothing.  It was acting like there is either a blown fuse or the
circuit was tripped.

Now, this particular circuit breaker is in a breaker box in the ceiling,
next to the air handlers for the building.  It is dark up there.so here I
go, climbing up this ladder to check the circuit.  Did I mention it is dark
up there.so the only way you can check the circuit is by feel.  Well that
isn't doing me any good, so I climb back down and get a flash light
(yeah.should have thought of that first). The circuit is not tripped.what
the heck.so I start looking at the wires coming into the box.they are
disconnected.  So I follow them to the box they come from.wires aren't only
disconnected.they are cut off.  No more air compressor.

As part of the building rehab, they are re-doing the electric.  The
electricians didn't know that box was feeding our circuit.  Heck, it wasn't
part of what they needed, so they decided to just take it out altogether.
So, to make a long story short, our large compressor won't be working again
any time soon.  Fortunately, we have a back up compressor that runs on 120
v, and while it does work hard to try and keep up, it does a fine job
operating one machine at a time.

So, since we didn't have a compressor on Tuesday, all we could do was an
alignment with bars being fed into the machine.no way to put the machine in
play mode because no air.  Today we got air and were able to fine tune the
adjustments and got the picture looking really good.

Some interesting observations.

1.      Blanking on house playback is really wide.  Apparently, this is
necessary for something to do with recording (according to the manual), but
if set strictly to the manual settings it is almost too wide.  We aren't
going to record anyway.  For playback, our plan is to use House mode instead
of Regen (any thoughts on this??)

2.      System runs better in manual track mode as compared to auto track
mode.

3.      Originally we thought we would have to run the system in tone wheel
mode, but it seems to do fine in Pix lock.at least with the tapes we've
tested so far.

4.      Video signal is surprisingly stable.  We will be recording to
Digital Betacam from these machines, so only testing will tell if it is
stable enough.  I am concerned about low-band B&W video, since there appears
to be no burst in the video (as you would expect).not sure if D-beta will
like this or not.

5.      We were running a 1-hour tape.  The reel brakes need some
adjustment, as the mass of this reel was just too much for the brake to stop
it by itself.  This also caused tension issues.  But, switching to spot
reels caused less problems (we originally thoughts the brakes weren't
working at all.but it just appears as if they need some adjustment).

6.      I take back what I said about the manuals not being
well-written.they actually are pretty good.  One of the challenges is that
sometimes they reference a board by number (3A20 for example) and other
times by name.and the names in the manual are not always the same as on the
board because of abbreviation.

I do not know exactly why we had the set back we did the other day.all I can
guess is that we did all of our adjustments without the bars generator
genlocked to the machine.which caused our adjustments to be "off".  

We are going to get into transferring this week.I'll keep you posted as to
how it is going.  And then onto the second machine.I want to get it up and
running as a spare.

Anyway, a BIG 'OL THANKS to the people on the Quad List group for your
support, help and insight.  You know the genlock thing the other day was
just one of those things.We checked the signal coming from the generator.and
we checked bars.but we never checked to make sure they were actually
genlocked (as I mentioned, apparently the gunlock input on the bars
generator doesn't work).  Again.sometimes it is the simple things that we
take for granted that cause the biggest problems.  The video drifting should
have been a major clue.but we were having trouble seeing video output.  Once
we got that hooked up and with the insight of some of the people from this
list, we figured out the problem and were able to get back on track.

Thanks again!!!

John Walko

Media Archive Manager

Scene Savers

800-978-3445

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