Tape Memories
Back in 1962, I attended the Ampex tape recorder school for one week in Redwood City, California. I think the recorder ID number was an FR-600. It was a Navy sponsored class prior to installing two large seven + one track recorders in the telemetry shack on the USS Norton Sound. The eighth track was low fidelity used for voice annotation only. I wish I still had the class notes and information from that time. One of the demonstrations they were particularly proud of was when they hooked one of the inputs to an antenna. Later, during playback, they were able to tune an AM radio to several stations recorded as RF on the 60"/sec tape.
It was a good class, mostly orientated to operation, cleaning and some minor troubleshooting to the schematic level. One of the nice features was a short 19" panel containing 7 tiny oscilloscopes used for setting record levels. Only one of the two recorders we received had this feature with the other one using regular VU meters.
When the recorders were delivered to the ship which was in drydock in San Francisco, I tried to follow the installation instructions as best I could. They were particularly emphatic on having the recorders installed on a level surface. It's a hard thing to find a carpenters bubble level on a ship. The shops I tried were certain that I had been sent on a fool's errand by the Chief petty officer.
The recorders were used to store telemetry data from test missiles. There were several channels of sub-carrier frequencies that carried data from the missile such as pressures, temperatures, fin position, battery condition, accelerations and so on. These were demodulated and fed to an oscillograph light beam recorder during flight and also recorded on tape. Later, the data reduction team would measure these variables for use by the Navy and the manufacturers of the missile and components.
The tape was 1/2" wide and stored on large diameter tape reels. We had a large room full of these reels which were stored in less than desirable conditions. High humidity with large temperature swings made some of the early tapes very brittle. We made a tape splitter to make 1/4" tape for our personal recorders, but the variability in width and poor fidelity didn't make for a very good product.
Later, just before the ship was decommissioned, a lot of this tape was simply dumped overboard as we cruised off the coast of California. I hope this practice has stopped, but we didn't think much about it at the time.
It was a good class, mostly orientated to operation, cleaning and some minor troubleshooting to the schematic level. One of the nice features was a short 19" panel containing 7 tiny oscilloscopes used for setting record levels. Only one of the two recorders we received had this feature with the other one using regular VU meters.
When the recorders were delivered to the ship which was in drydock in San Francisco, I tried to follow the installation instructions as best I could. They were particularly emphatic on having the recorders installed on a level surface. It's a hard thing to find a carpenters bubble level on a ship. The shops I tried were certain that I had been sent on a fool's errand by the Chief petty officer.
The recorders were used to store telemetry data from test missiles. There were several channels of sub-carrier frequencies that carried data from the missile such as pressures, temperatures, fin position, battery condition, accelerations and so on. These were demodulated and fed to an oscillograph light beam recorder during flight and also recorded on tape. Later, the data reduction team would measure these variables for use by the Navy and the manufacturers of the missile and components.
The tape was 1/2" wide and stored on large diameter tape reels. We had a large room full of these reels which were stored in less than desirable conditions. High humidity with large temperature swings made some of the early tapes very brittle. We made a tape splitter to make 1/4" tape for our personal recorders, but the variability in width and poor fidelity didn't make for a very good product.
Later, just before the ship was decommissioned, a lot of this tape was simply dumped overboard as we cruised off the coast of California. I hope this practice has stopped, but we didn't think much about it at the time.