[GreenKeys] Fw: BBC enquiry - telegraph machine

[WA5CAB--- via GreenKeys]

Did it by any chance use light sensitive paper?  That's what we used until 
we went digital in the late 1980's.  The somewhat smaller Honeywell 1858 CRT 
based recorders that we used up until the end couldn't get up to quite that 
speed but the Bell & Howell 12" machines could throw the end of the paper 
15 or 20 feet before it hit the floor.  You didn't dare crank the transport 
speed up into that region unless you preset the number of feet of paper to 
spit out.  More than once, we had inexperienced Field Supervisors dump a full 
475' roll of paper before they could muster the guts to get back to the 
machine and turn it off.

Back to the original subject, was the undulator a single channel device?

In a message dated 06/18/2014 23:27:56 PM Central Daylight Time, 
62.5milliamps at gmail.com writes: 
> Absolutely Robert,
> 
> The oscillograph we used in the ASCAC on the Randolph was impressive.  It 
> could stretch out a sonar ping about 5 feet wide. It would scare some of 
> our guys that had never seen it shoot paper out like that before.
> Still for dial pulse work on old trunk circuits the pen or chart recorder 
> was nice and most were fairly easy to carry around.
> 
> 
> Don
> 
> 
> 
> On 18 Jun 2014, at 6:00 PM, WA5CAB--- via GreenKeys wrote:
> 
> Although the term "pen recorder" or the similar "chart recorder" remained 
> in use (especially among the raft of small oil patch companies who built 
> their own), the term "oscillograph" became commonly used by companies like 
> Bell &Howell, Honeywell, probably Gould, etc. who built commercial 
> multi-channel ones that accomplished the recording process in various ways not 
> limited to pen and ink.
> 
> In a message dated 06/18/2014 16:55:49 PM Central Daylight Time, 
> 62.5milliamps at gmail.com writes: 
> >> In the Bell System we called them "Pen Recorders"  They were used with  
>> 
>> old alarm circuits for fire and police.
>> We also used pen recorders, and the newer equivalent made by Gould, to  
>> track voltages and troubleshoot dial pulse problems.
>> 
>> Don
>> K9TTY
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On 17 Jun 2014, at 11:10 AM, Jim Haynes wrote:
>> 
>> An undulator is an ink recorder.  Like a slow oscillograph, the inked  
>> line displays on a moving paper tape the polarity and amplitude of the  
>> signal coming out of an ocean cable.  In ocean cable work they used  
>> one polarity
>> for dot and the other for dash, thus gaining speed.  And they tended to
>> push the speed of signaling above the bandwidth of the cable, so that
>> the operator had to infer what was sent from the wiggles on the tape.
>> 
>> Ink recorders were also used in high-speed Morse work (up to 500 wpm
>> on radio circuits) but I don't think those were called undulators.  And
>> they used conventional Morse make-and-break keying so the dashes were
>> 3 times as long as the dots.
>> 
>> jhhaynes at earthlink dot net
> 
> 
> 

Robert & Susan Downs - Houston
wa5cab dot com (Web Store)
MVPA 9480
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/greenkeys/attachments/20140619/60fecbea/attachment.html>