[Milsurplus] Disappointed...Re: What is it?

[KD7JYK DM09]

Well, I fired this thing up, in a sense...

I figured out the low voltage side is 12.6 volts.  I opened the ELT up,
clipped a negative wire from my power supply to ground and +12.6 VDC to a
resistor just before the encoder motor.  I didn't bother to measure the
voltage going into the motor, it was running which was all I needed.

Now to figure out the "serial encoder".  The clockwork is just that, a motor
to a set of gears and concentric shafts.  I'll use an analog mechanical
clock as an analogy for the encoder.

The disk inside the encoder is the hour hand, is rotates slowly.  It has two
contacts printed on it, I'd say from 12-1 and 2-3.  This turns the
transmitter on.

The outer disk, which can be seen in the ebay photo with all the little
"bits" printed on it I'll compare to the minute hand, which rotates much
faster.  The contacts on that result in a switch closure from 12-7.  All the
little printed bits on it are for redundancy in the keying circuit.  It's
either ON or OFF.

Here I was expecting some bad-ass archaic serially encoded cryptic data
format using two encoder wheels sending some sort of a signal in a format
not heard since the idea was created...  Nope.  On and off every so many
minutes, that's it.

Calling this serial is like calling CW digital.  It IS, but...

Kurt