[QuadList] RCA Models

[Don Norwood]

Hi Bill:

Always great to get your first-hand experiences and these interesting stories!

As for the technology behind multichannel transverse scan recording, it was developed for scientific and military applications in the early 60's, so there wasn't much of a delay between the videotape recorder and other applications for transverse scan.  I have much more information regarding RCA's work in this field than I have about Ampex.  Some of the early designs were rather crude, and some of the systems used much slower writing speeds than used for video, but the ability to record two different broadband channels simultaneously was a big deal.  Here's a pic of both low-speed and hi-speed Octaplex headwheels from the early 60's.



Don Norwood
Digitrak Communications, Inc.
www.digitrakcom.com

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Bill Carpenter 


  Hi Don & Everybody,

  This is an interesting thread, I was product manager for the VR-3000, and in the early fall of 1973, my boss, who had worked at WSM-TV was contacted by his ex boss, Lee Whitehurst. The had been pitched the TVR-10 for a new "venture", so we brought a group of engineers to Redwood City and had some conceptual discussions and the VR-3000 would not meet their needs. We sold them an "outline drawing", with "not to exceed" measurements and weights of a full functioning broadcast quadraplex machine to be delivered by the end of April 1974. 
  At NAB we saw the drawings of the "Bread Truck", single camera mobile they were building, for the "New Venture", Opryland. 
  I shipped the sixth production, AVR-2 from the Huston show floor on Wenesday evening and it was providing news inserts, on the evening news in Nashville on Friday, in less than 48hrs, and was the first AVR-2 use "On-Air".

  In another vein, both of the Quad based expermental digital machines ("Annie, AVR-3 based) and the AVR-2 for Montreaux, used an Octiplex head, maybe even the same one and as I remember it provided two seperate data streams. The instrumentation div of Ampex, had used this for some Govt. products, so it was a known technology.

  Bill Carpenter

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