Amen to that. And you can't do a product or a company just by yourself! Well, sometimes you can, but you become the limiting factor very quickly.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but too many Master Ken's would garner the attention of the world's bastards who would manipulate their good nature and joy of problem solving for evil purposes

That idea is both amusing and horrifying :-)

@@zeeclone Sadly, pretty much like it is at the moment, with the greedy, power hungry, exploiting anyone and anything they can for their own advancement. At almost every level.

Like Joe 90?

Ah thanks, that would make even more sense.

I know! My brain hurts just re-watching it, but we wanted to document how it had been done. If you want to avoid brain injury, you can jump straight to 23:25 and just listen to the commands being sent...

@@CuriousMarc wouldn’t miss a second fast forwarding.

Eesh! Don't forget to add about 50 or more to their ages at the time... Time flies, don't it? Seems like yesterday.

Most of the original team is dead.

The PSK encoding and data communications standards that NASA came up is simply brilliant.

This construction was quite standard in the 60s. Univac mainframes used the same connectors.

Why not say the full name..?

I wouldn't call this progress "small" or "slow", these guys are machines. Every step is a huge hurdle but you will see just a small slice of the work they do. :D

And KZfaq translate calls it fax bursts, oh those barbarians.

The AGC circuit used by Microdyne in the series I worked on at the factory used 14 op amps. It produced a linear 0-5V output. This was to be able to implement the video combiner circuit for Diversity reception. When properly calibrated you could have a signal fade across two receivers with under a 0.1dB change in output. The 700/1620 series was even better. That was the last fully analog signal processing design. It was followed by the RCB2000, which was the first commercial SDR design that I took from prototypes to manufacturing. A popular Microdyne test system at that time was the TSS2000 which could generate everything except FQPSK modulation (which we had just received a license to use). Defense Electronics and Microdyne were both in the Telemetry business during the Apollo program. Some engineers and a salesman at Defense Electronics left to start Microdyne, because Defense Electronics wasn't interested in a 100% solid state design, which was the first in their 1100 series. We were still building a few replacement systems for that early design in the late '90s. It was modular based, so it could be customized to the customer's requirements. They went through the 1200 series, the 1400 series, the 2800 series which was to be sold to China for Intelsat TV service (Which was denied by our government to ship). Then the 700/1520 series. There was limited sales of some VXI boards to build systems from, then the RCB2000, and a single receiver version that used a subset of the boards. If this was built in Rockville Maryland, it was one of these two companies.

I don't know if that's possible, since the connectors are so custom and ancient. Last time, they had to have Marc's employer make them totally custom... The other way could be the debugging port, but that's where the simulator connects, so that's already taken up.

Not yet! Each time I am close to getting to one of them, some other piece of Apollo equipment comes our way…

Yes, you figured out how it works! The message is read first and stored and displayed, but only transmitted when the next message is read in.

"Why would anyone throw a snake on a problem?"

- The test messages operations are not fully described in this drawing, but they are meant to test every part of the decoder. On the part that tests the data payload, one loads zeroes, the other message loads ones, and a few bits are reserved for the amount of rotation so you squeeze one of the bits out for testing. - The curve on top uses serial NRZ coding. NRZ means non return to zero. So when 3 bits are ones, they all merge together. Same for zeroes. That's why it's hard to visually identify the individual bits unless you have the serial clock signal right underneath. Same is true for the sub-bits. Hope that helps!

Now I know what record I'm gonna play today. Thanks! :)

No we couldn’t find any information on what components or modules are missing. Actually no information for this box at all, nor even the gray modules that somehow Ken was able to reverse engineer. It still blows my mind that he could do that. So we’ll have to guess what the functionality should be and try to redo it with modern (or vintage!) components.

The graph algorithm is pretty simple, forming connected components out of the data. E.g. if pins A and B are connected and B and C are connected, then A, B, and C form one interconnection net. (In the example, we should see A and C connected as well, but even if that's missing, I still lump A, B, and C together.) At the end, I get a list of all the sets of interconnected pins. The main problem is that the power and ground pins are in effect shorted together by the filter capacitors, so any pins connected to a grounded switch also end up in the big power "lump".

@@KenShirriff Thank you Master Ken! Always like watching you guys in action. Kindest Regards, P.

Yeah, made me think of Klipper arrangement.

I was thinking the same thing - it's a predecessor to SNMP!

The Z symbol refer to where the wire is going when it’s going to do a long jump to another part of the drawing or another drawing altogether. Gives the landing page and the X-Y rectangle location. For the CTE, it’s just one line. You pulse it repeatedly. Want to advance 10 hours? Pulse the hour line 10 times…

At one point Marc is just going to build a complete Apollo spacecraft in his backyard

We do too :-) !

@@DangerousPictures imagine within 20 years you see them transmit from the moon