Thanks to the great support by Tony Korte and his team from Videomagnetics we have our FR-900 tape drive head back and today. We got the machine back up and running after the usual problems in getting a head on the machine and getting things recalibrated. We will be back capturing tapes Monday morning.
Today we mailed the rest of the 8X10 images to people that are due them and we mailed 70 of the microfilm images that people who donated $50 are getting. We will have all of our fulfillment done by the end of this coming week.
We also have had another milestone in that our student Jacob Gold, working with Ken Zin has gotten our tape time code reader quasi working. This is something that we have wanted for a long time to minimize head wear as what we have to do now is spin a tape in to near where we want and then watch for the framelet strip numerical ID’s to determine where we need to start capturing for those tapes that have some overlap with the other ground stations. The time code use is called NASA-36 which is decades obsolete with no modern hardware that reads it. Jacob and Ken got this one working finally today after fixing problems with the time code reader itself and a broken wire on the audio stack on the tape machine.
This picture shows Jacob standing with the time code reader above his head. It mostly works and we will get the final bugs out of it as we run tape next week. We think that this time code reader reads the actual day of the year down to the second when the tape was made. This will save us money and head wear!