[R-390] Mason Labs R-390A?

[Alan Victor]

I was a co-op at the Univ of FL during Apollo 12 and 13. Worked in the VAB
and ran around the AS vehicles when they were in the VAB. I built a P Band
down converter in my spare time and would listen into the LCC comm between
the Sat V and the LCC. We dragged a small P band helical antenna across
Titusville Beach and listened in REAL time to the comms. The converter
played into a Drake 2B operating on 30 MHz as a tunable IF. I recall trying
to keep audio from the Apollo CSM centered up in the receiver IF during
overhead passes of the spacecraft before they broke away from earth orbit!
The doppler shift was amazing. Wish I knew about building PLL tracking LO's
at the time. What a thrill! There were several guys who lived around the
Cape. Some of them had spare parts of the entire tracking station scattered
around their ENTIRE house. One fellow had the entire spare INSTRUMENT UNIT
from the Sat V in his backyard.None of the going ons now, would surprise
me!

Alan W4AMV

On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 11:59 PM Brown Beezer via R-390 <
r-390 at mailman.qth.net> wrote:

> And I thought I was insane.....
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Guyger via R-390 <r-390 at mailman.qth.net>
> To: Tisha Hayes <tisha.hayes at gmail.com>
> Cc: R390A <r-390 at mailman.qth.net>
> Sent: Sun, Jan 30, 2022 8:09 pm
> Subject: Re: [R-390] Mason Labs R-390A?
>
> Go to YouTube and search “Apollo Comms” there’s a team of guys who are
> restoring / resurrecting actual Apollo S band radios and the telemetry and
> voice modules.
>
> They’re getting them fully functional, and they have a ridiculous
> collection of RF test gear to play with.
>
> The radio gear has been in storage since Apollo days, and the hermetically
> sealed aluminum boxes were still pressurized with Nitrogen. NASA didn’t
> spare any money on making these things environmentally resistant.
>
> Bill AD5OL
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Jan 30, 2022, at 9:29 PM, Tisha Hayes <tisha.hayes at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Some people romanticize the idea that the R-390A was used to listen to
> > Apollo moon landings but the reality was different;
> >
> > The Apollo missions primarily operated in the S-Band (around 2.1 GHz)
> with
> > some backup capability at 296.9 MHz. If you dig in the references you
> will
> > see that the Gemini capsules did have HF capability at 15.016 MHz but it
> is
> > not documented if it was ever used. By Apollo the references to the
> 15.016
> > MHz system was dropped but maybe it was something available as a
> > post-splashdown SAR/recovery unit in addition to the 296.9 (and maybe
> > 243.0) aviation-type radios.
> >
> > In the S-Band the system operated off of a PM (like FM) carrier with
> > sub-carriers for voice and telemetry. Some of the sub-carriers could be
> > turned off and the main carrier was also used for position/ velocity
> > tracking with a pretty high degree of accuracy.
> >
> > At one time I thought that the capability of putting an external
> oscillator
> > on an R-390A might have something to do with compensating for doppler
> shift
> > (from spacecraft motion) but it makes more sense that it would be used
> for
> > high-stability operations with HF RTTY/Data on fixed or maybe even
> > shipboard operations. During Apollo, NASA had lots of tracking stations
> on
> > land and at sea.
> >
> > *Ms. Tisha Hayes*
> >
> > *AA4HA*
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