As WUWT readers know, I covered a fascinating project on 3/31 here showing how a team of dedicated technical archaeologists are trying the get old AMPEX 2″ reel to reel data recorders functional again so that they can recover thousnads of moon and earth images from the 1960’s that would otherwise be lost to history. There is a current scientific interest in the images, as some may help determine the extent of polar ice during those years.
I’ve offered WUWT as a vehicle to help find parts and manuals. You may have access to these things and not know it. Ask around, especially with the old-timers in your department, and check your dusty basements and storage areas. – Anthony
A message from Dennis Wingo:
The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP), is a NASA ESMD funded project to recover the original Lunar Orbiter analog data which was recorded on an Ampex FR-900 2″ video instrumentation recorder. As far as we know, we have the last surviving drives of this type in the world. We have retired Ampex engineers working with us on this project but the FR-900 was a limited use machine (exclusively the U.S. government at the FAA, USAF, NASA).
What we need is to find any possible source of documentation (we know about the Stanford Archive and have been there many times) for the FR-900 or the possibility of actual machines.
There are similar machines with the numbers FR-901, FR-902, FR-950 that are close enough that we can use any information on them.
Please email to Anthony (or drop a comment below) and he will forward to me or drop us a note at www.moonviews.com
Thanks very much!!!
Dennis Wingo
LOIRP Project Lead
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well, I will look in my sams photo facts.
all my old capacitors will be junk though( even the ones never used.
all this stuff i have is pre 1980s
I may have small Tubes brand new ( never used) but most are prior (1972)
I have not repaired a video Tape deck for over 10 years.
It might help to list what you need at your web sight.
Luke may the force be with you!!!
If you could publish photos, specs and diagrams of what is needed you might find people who could engineer those parts from scratch.
Try some old time tv studio’s they used ampex 2″ tape recorders for video recording and playback, should be a few lying around. The tape drives looked to be the same, the electronics might be a bit different from the FR900 series . I remember (this ages me a bit) converting a TV studio from an RCA video recorder with 2000 radio type valves weighing about a ton to one using Ampex recorders it had “wonders of wonders” transistors and was only the size of a deep freezer. !!! Have things changed.
Interesting the rotating heads on the ampex spun at such high speed across the tape that relativistic effects were reported to be observed in the head wear.
It is possible that additional specimens of these recorders could have been used by other agencies besides NASA. Though I would imagine this has been researched already, one might see if they can obtain the manufacturing records for these devices and see how many were shipped. They could well have been used for recording data and imagery of other than the civilian sort during the cold war years.
As Aron says above publish what you need, I have contacts in China that have bought hundreds of tons of electronic military surplus and I can assure you that they throw nothing away, if these machines went through the usual channels they would have been stripped and cataloged in China, Let us know what you need. Part No.etc,.
Lindsay H:
“Try some old time tv studio’s they used ampex 2″ tape recorders for video recording and playback,”
I don’t know the FR-900 but it doesn’t look like an helical or transversal recorder. It looks like a stationary head recorder. It the heads are OK and if there is a circuit diagram it should not be difficult to repair.
In 1981, NASA Goddard in Cleveland, Oh had these recorders. IF I remember right they were also used in the Air Force. There used to be a couple of huge ware houses at Goddard that were just full of stuff.
Front-page headline in the Canadian National Post today:
“Climate Change Not All Man-Made, report says.”
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1453831&p=2
The report:
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-3/final-report/
Two points from the executive summary
• More than half of this warming is likely
the result of human-caused greenhouse gas
forcing of climate change.
• Changes in ocean temperatures likely explain
a substantial fraction of the humancaused
warming of North America.
The report is called a “re-analysis”, from the department of “reanalysis”. Is NOAA preparing its “Get Out Of Jail Free” card?
One place I can recommend to try would be surplus sales of Nebraska. They have a huge wearhouse of old stuff just lying around waiting for someone who is looking to mae something old new again. I remember spending hours wandering around their shop when it was still accessable to the public, now it is strictly call ahead and mai order.
http://www.surplussales.com/index.html
The Science Museum in London has a huge amount of technology from the last century, it might be an idea to email them.
The BBC also had a huge technical department and had lots of A/V equipment in storage. They recently asked watchers/listeners to send in old recording of programs to digitize. I suspect that they may be able to help.
Anybody out there in WUWT land know La Jolla’ s Ken Rockwell from
http://www.kenrockwell.com/index.htm. ?
He has a Photography site with a huge readership. He is also holds an engineering degree and holds patents in digital imaging techniques. He has worked for Hollywood and TV land on imaging systems. This should be right up his or his readers alley.
Anybody know how to drop him a line?
Thanks folks
The Nebraska place sounds interesting. The China thing with U.S. military surplus sounds interesting as well. At this time we are looking for some very specific parts that were custom made for the FR-900 and circuit boards from those machines. There are oven based ultrastable oscillators in the machine that are 100% one off’s (we have some Hallicrafter’s .1 ppm 1Mhz ultrastable oscillators for example in the machine).
We have made many of our own parts, including Capstan pinch rollers, belts for the motors, and other parts.
We are specifically looking, more than anything else, manuals for the machines. I cannot tell you how many times we have tracked things down to find that we are a year, six months, or even a couple of months late after things were thrown in the dumpster.
We need FR-900 specific stuff as the commercial Ampex VR-1200, VR-2000’s, and AVR series are just different enough that we cannot use the hardware (this was probably intentional as you can charge the government more for unique items that are not sold in the commercial market).
Just as an FYI, our exact machine is an FR-900A-1 machine, which means that it could be used as part of an FR-950 which was an 8 head machine with two electronics bays (an octoplex recorder).
Our heads are not the commercial Mark15 air bearing heads, but are Mark-10 ball bearing. One thing we can do is take the Mark-15 drum assembly and use it on a Mark-10 head so if there are any heads floating around out there of either type this would help.
Since these machines were almost exclusively government purchased (The FAA used them to record radar data, as did the USAF) and NASA used them for the early Nimbus missions (there may be raw data from Nimbus out there as well!), we have been through the federal records (I will dig up the National Stock Number for the machine later today as I am on travel) and am pretty sure that the government does not have any left at all.
So thanks and good hunting as this could help us keep the machines running (which is going to be an effort in and of itself as we have 1500 tapes to digitize!!!). We are committed to bringing this history to life for our own enjoyment as well as for posterity.
OT but thought you guys might like to see this from one of Canadas National Newspapers:
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1453831
It may be worth cointacting some of the large telcos for old equipment in their basements.
Any folks watching Arctic sea ice.
There is a now a fair idea of how things are moving. I’ve tweaked to try and get very close to right, given that ends of plots are difficult.
Ice is now following 2004, less than 2003 and 2008.
The Arctic SSW during Jan/Feb is my guess on what put a flat on the ice extent leading up to the peak. This event is probably what broken the icy Jan weather in western Europe, it remained over North America.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature/10mb9065.gif
(other plots off here
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature/)
“Starting in January and extending into early February 2009, wind and temperature patterns in the stratosphere changed dramatically. In just a few weeks, temperatures climbed by about 50 degrees Celsius (90 degrees F) on average, with larger spikes in places, and winds flipped direction, changing by nearly 100 meters per second (200 miles per hour). ”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36972
http://www.gpsl.net/climate/data/sea_ice/ijis-np-sea-ice-2009-04-02a.png
and
http://www.gpsl.net/climate/data/sea_ice/ijis-np-sea-ice-parallel-2009-04-02a.png
Spring blossom is starting to arrive here in England. Actually pleasant and weakly sunny.
Hello Dennis Wingo:
WRT old FR-900 Ampex recorders you said:
”(The FAA used them to record radar data, as did the USAF) and NASA used them for the early Nimbus missions ….”
The Navy also used Ampex recorders extensively in the 1970s and probably into the early 1980s in some cases, for recording of non-destructive exercise test data from undersea weapons. The above photo of the Ampex recorder brings back vague 30+ year old memories of the data reduction area at the government facility where I worked before I retired. That base has a very nice technical museum where a lot of old technology has been saved. I would guess there is at least a fair chance they have one or more Ampex recorders in storage if not on display. Have no idea if they might be FR-900 models, but it should be pretty easy for me to check with the museum curators if you want (costs me nothing to ask, and for a good cause like this one if they have one my guess is good chance they might be willing to contribute).
Some early NASA satelite photos. one shows antarctica in 1967. Quality not so good of course:
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-168/section1.htm#12
I work in a building that used to be a DISA facility, that used to be a NWS office, that used to be a NASA facility (the place’s first mission…I think).
There was a LOT of very old electrical equipment in the basement room in which I am now sitting, yet all of it was in pristine condition. After lunch, I am going to go poke around the warehouse space where all of that stuff went about 3 years ago.
I am in Slidell, LA. I know I saw some items that look somewhat like the pic above and that name Ampex rings a bell, too.
Not sure if this helps, but manual might in California archives @ur momisugly
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=ft4s2004rn&chunk.id=c02-1.3.9.2.3&brand=oac
Preliminary Guide to the Ampex Corporation Records
[ Carton 49 ]
[ Folder 6924 ]
FR-900 USASRDL Data Terminal tape handler (7-59). Accession No. 2001-146. Photographs : b&w Negatives : bandw
If you are having issues finding the 1MHz 100ppB stability oscillators I may be able to help. At the time these units were built stabilities like that were only attainable with an ovenized unit. Today those type of stabilities are easily reachable with Temperature Compensated as well as Microcontroller Compensated oscillators. If I look around I may have a few lying around that you can have. I just need to know the frequency output, waveform, power and terminating impedance (if a sine output), or voltage if something else. It would also be helpful to know input voltage and operating conditions as well.
This could be very important information. I wonder if some of the photographs that do exist show an ice extent from past decades that could be used favorably to compare with todays ice volumes.
Could be another blow to the AGW theory, but if the photos show a much larger ice volume, it could go the other way also.
I work in a building that used to be a DISA facility, that used to be a NWS office, that used to be a NASA facility (the place’s first mission…I think).
There was a LOT of very old electrical equipment in the basement room in which I am now sitting, yet all of it was in pristine condition. After lunch, I am going to go poke around the warehouse space…
I just talked to the building supers. They said dozens of tape drives very much like that one went to the landfill one year ago. That sux.
Sorry if I got anyone’s hopes up. I was hopeful.
I didn’t find anything interesting on eBay at the moment. Actually, the wooden B-47 bomber is interesting, but not relevant. Looking through the options… I don’t see a way to add to a “Wanted” list, although the “Saved searches” tool may be useful.
Try CBC in Toronto; I heard a little gossip in the last day or so that they are about to ‘retire’ one of their old 1″ tape machines, and may possibly have other similar surplus equipment still on site. Worth a try.
Have sent this info to some contacts in Huntsville, AL. The Von Braun Astronomical Soc. have some of the old timers as members. Also back about 8-9 years ago, the Alabama Space and Rocket Center, cleared some of it’s space stuff by selling off to the public a mix/match of what ever NASA had unloaded on them. So it’s possible there are images in basement/attics of the Rocket City.