[Milsurplus] Manual for RD-142/UN?

[Bruce Gentry]

On 2/19/13 6:12 PM, C.Whitaker wrote:
> de WB2CPN
> The RD-142 was for recording air traffic control facilities
> such as control tower etc.
> In 1963 I was at Kadena, and a civilian contractor came and
> installed a few rack-mounted recorders for ATC use.  They
> were 16-channel on to a 3/4 inch (?) tape.
>
> Clete
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By the late 1960s. Hollywood quite literally came to the rescue for air 
traffic control logging. The Magnasync/Moviola company that made motion 
picture editing equipment began producing a long running ten channel 
logging recorder. It used ten inch reeels of 1/2 inch tape, and ran at  
7/8 inch per second, allowing twelve hours on one reel of tape. A 
fail-safe signal was recorded, and immediately played by the third 
head.  If the  signal was lost, the second tape transport took over, and 
an alarm was made. I hated the ritual of changing the tapes at noon, 
real and contrived delays could cause the five minute procedure to take 
an hour or more.  We also had a playback deck that was variable speed 
and easily reversable, so a tape could be carefully reviewed. For a time 
signal, we had a Dictachron Time Announcer that was just about as 
reliable as the RD-142. It used a 16 MM magnetic film that advanced once 
a minute over a rotating drum with a head in it, then the drum turned to 
play the announcement. At the end of a 12 hour cycle, the film reversed 
and the rotating head played another set of announcements on the second 
track. It was terribly unreliable, we would contrive any excuse to take 
it out of service for parts or other reasons and substitute the time 
signal from JJY. An R-388 was immensely more reliable.

       bruce Gentry, KA2IVY