[QuadList] From the TR 800 Crypt

[Phillip G. Shaw]

[Quote]The first TR 800's I saw were in the QV remote truck. But the problems with reliability were so bad that RCA assigned an engineer during one remote in Vegas who did nothing but sit by the VTR door and waited for one of us to yell "help, we have a runaway!".[/quote]

I was that Engineer in Vegas &  Denver Mile high  The problem was that RCA had a bunch of Post Production (film type) design a remote control (copy of Ampex HS100 Slo- mo) and they where trying to use it for NFL Replay ,, 6 button combinations  to push, upper/lower case, to store points in a story line process.. The Marketing folks didn't  have a clue... they had requested software updates, from engineering, to speed up the machine cueing speed (after all that time spent storing shit on the remote & operator Screwup) the tape was almost jumping off the scanner... A simple "in point", trim and cue was all the NFL-Live needed. In those days the button/function people had stupid expectations because of a lack of experence of Live Network Broadcasting

It has been said on this Board that NBC did not try TR800's.
"NOT True"

NBC NYC did have 2ea  TR800's installed on the 5th floor. Special NBC consols were designed. I was the RCA Engineer that was sent to NBC to cure a thermal problem with the TBC.. The RCA design Engineer, Jim Parker was absolutly brilliant, but refused to use the normal practice of bypassing  the TBC in EE .. the NBC operators saw vector jitter(CB) in EE and it was impossible to fix..NBC sent the Machines back ( I told Steve Bonica the truth & was offered a Job at NBC ) The second Shop Order of Tr-800 used a TBC from Florida...

Ray Baldock worked on the TR-800 Factory QC in 1981..
He was part of a group from UK / Jersey Isle working for Peter Dare (later Sony) in the factory to ship the first production of 6 Machines to South America by Dec 15th 1981.. They failed! and Dare left RCA.. Ray worked on the design of Silver Lake (Cart Machine replacement for TCR 100) and he went to Odetics when RCA Closed..

Note: Three of us from Tech Alert set up an Engineering factory Audit.. The factory shipped to Audit and we fixed
all the faults before shipping to Customers. The first TR 800
had > 2000 Engineering Change Orders, it was a nightmare.
We feed back the faults to the factory but they didn't change anything, actually thing got worse.. Broadcast moved to Gibbsboro

I did save the Ampex VPR-3 from been rejected by NBC-NY
(Bancroft was Ampex Field Engineer)

Phillip G. Shaw
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