OT: Moon Landing

[Clifford Heath]

On 20/7/19 9:49 am, Cursitor Doom wrote:

On Fri, 19 Jul 2019 05:36:23 +0000, Jan Panteltje wrote:

we got the Apollo feeds nicely at 625 lines interlaced,
I think at that time real time converted by the BBC converter in the UK
from the US 512 lines or whatever feed.

All the European TV coverage of the moon landings came via the Goonhilly
Earth Station in England:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goonhilly_Satellite_Earth_Station

Only just found that out from a feature on the local news tonight.

A VK5 (South Australia) amateur yesterday made a real-time 50yr replay
of the landing audio via 5.6GHz EME link to Goonhilly. They used a 28m
dish at one end and 33m at the other, and when setting it up on
Saturday, found that they each were illuminating such a small part of
the Moon's surface with their narrow beams that adjustment got them +4dB
on the link.

!!!

Clifford Heath.

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 22/7/19 11:22 am, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:

Clifford Heath <no.spam@please.net> wrote in news:sy7ZE.40412$472.6431
@fx12.iad:

The final crash site of the discarded Apollo 11 LEM is still unknown,
despite years of high-resolution mapping. Strange, because the
footprints are clearly visible.

Huh? Crash site?

No. They LANDED the ENTIRE LEM. They launched leaving behind the
LEM base. All of the Apolla landing sites are known. Nothing is
missing. Nothing was 'discarded'. All of our gear still up on the
Moon is still all our gear. We discarded nor relenquished ownership of
none of it.

After re-entering the command module, the ascent part crashed on the
Moon. No-one knows where.

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 18/7/19 6:33 pm, gregz wrote:

Clifford Heath <no.spam@please.net> wrote:
On 15/7/19 9:23 am, Michael Terrell wrote:
On Sunday, July 14, 2019 at 11:32:44 AM UTC-4, amdx wrote:
On 7/14/2019 8:59 AM, Cursitor Doom wrote:
Gentlemen,

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the 'first manned moon landing' as
it were, I'm just wondering what proportion of the group believe the
whole thing was just an elaborate hoax for whatever reason?



The question is just to stupid to entertain.
But I have to ad, this morning I saw the seamstresses from Platex even
got in on the hoax of sewing moon suits together.
I was about 14 then and my mom let me stay up late to watch it.
I remember how crummy the video was.
The video was slow scan, due to the transmit power requirements. Higher
bandwidth required more power than was available. It was also heavier
than they could take on the mission. You can only get so much gain from the antennas.
Slow scan allowed the video to be transmitted on an audio channel. Once
it was received on earth, it was scan converted, to let the public see
it. It was crappy video, or nothing.
Amateur radio operators still use Slow Scan video on the HF and VHF bands.
It's been decades, but I think it was eight seconds per frame for
Amateur radio, to fit into a 5KHz audio channel. One commercial product was 'Robot'?
Some use NTSC video at higher frequencies. Some old CATV modulators are
on the proper bands, and are used with an amplifier for ATV.

The guys at HoneySuckle Creek who ran the equipment that showed the world
the First Step are having the (last?) big reunion this weekend. 450
Apollo tragics (including moi) will be there with them. Mike Dinn was
station manager at the time, and there are others still around who were
present at the time. So if you want to know any technical details, now
would be a really good time to ask! Also Andrew Tink's book "HoneySuckle
Creek" has most of the details.

Clifford Heath.

There are a lot of details on Honeysuckle Creek Tracking website.

That site is maintained by Colin McKellar, who assisted greatly with
organising yesterday's reunion. There's a bunch of other stuff that's
been shared privately with the attendees too.

Clifford Heath.

 

Clifford Heath <no.spam@please.net> wrote in news:gp8ZE.70070$jl6.12463
@fx04.iad:

After re-entering the command module, the ascent part crashed on the
Moon. No-one knows where.

Ahhh...

That would follow that they all did that.

If they cannot locate one, it is likely buried in the side wall of a
crater

 

[Rick C]

On Sunday, July 21, 2019 at 8:23:21 PM UTC-4, Clifford Heath wrote:

Incorrect. I wrote down many of the facts, direct from the Honeysuckle
engineers involved at the time, with whom I shared lunch just yesterday.
I have email addresses and phone numbers, and a promise from at least
one of them to scan and send the original documentation after their
return home. Bernard Smith was most helpful (he has amazing recall of
the details!), and Keith Brockelsby helped.

There was one S-band uplink (IIRC 2282.5MHz) modulated with:
* a 30KHz FM audio subcarrier
* a 70KHz biphase modulated command (data) channel,
* direct carrier phase modulation from the ranging PRNG
* Doppler from the relative velocity

The spacecraft receiver demodulated the ranging signal and directly
applied it to the transmit carrier. I have not been able to find out
whether that signal was squared-up (adding phase noise) before
re-transmitting. Ranging data was used to calibrate and separate the
Doppler vs oscillator drift.

There were two S-band downlink signals, one for TV, the other with a
1.024KHz telemetry signal and a 1.125MHz audio carrier. The telemetry
downlink was frequency-synthesised from the uplink frequency, using
analog phase locking. A ratio of 240/221 was mentioned and I think this
was the ratio, TBC.

The ranging PRNG had a bit rate of 992Kbps, sequence length about 5.5M,
for a 5.5 second repeat interval. It was composed of either a short code
or a long code, each produced from shift-register feedback generators of
various lengths. The short codes were 11,15,31,63 bits, and the long
codes were 11,31,63,127 bits. Ranging consisted of sending these in turn
and correlating each one (receiver had a delayed copy of the PRNGs). The
best correlation yielded a "Chinese number" (c.f. Chinese remainder
theorem) that was added in to start correlation using the next longer
sequence.

This was capable of range accuracy around 20cm at lunar distance, a
spectacular achievement at the time.

The ranging data was used for trajectory estimation (by variation from
the calculated path), because the earth baseline wasn't long enough for
accurate triangulation.

More details as I get them.

Clifford Heath.

Do you think the moon landing would have been possible/feasible if the transistor had not yet been invented? Sometimes I wonder how limited we are with the current technology.

I recall meeting some guys who worked at NASA facility in Florida. They claimed that even today (well, 10 years ago) there was no off the shelf technology that would substitute for the TTL logic based design they used to tie all the control center equipment together with the same level of fault protection and speed/latency. It was pretty interesting.

--

Rick C.

-- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 22/7/19 10:52 am, Rick C wrote:

On Sunday, July 21, 2019 at 8:23:21 PM UTC-4, Clifford Heath wrote:

Incorrect. I wrote down many of the facts, direct from the Honeysuckle
engineers involved at the time, with whom I shared lunch just yesterday.
I have email addresses and phone numbers, and a promise from at least
one of them to scan and send the original documentation after their
return home. Bernard Smith was most helpful (he has amazing recall of
the details!), and Keith Brockelsby helped.

There was one S-band uplink (IIRC 2282.5MHz) modulated with:
* a 30KHz FM audio subcarrier
* a 70KHz biphase modulated command (data) channel,
* direct carrier phase modulation from the ranging PRNG
* Doppler from the relative velocity

The spacecraft receiver demodulated the ranging signal and directly
applied it to the transmit carrier. I have not been able to find out
whether that signal was squared-up (adding phase noise) before
re-transmitting. Ranging data was used to calibrate and separate the
Doppler vs oscillator drift.

There were two S-band downlink signals, one for TV, the other with a
1.024KHz telemetry signal and a 1.125MHz audio carrier. The telemetry
downlink was frequency-synthesised from the uplink frequency, using
analog phase locking. A ratio of 240/221 was mentioned and I think this
was the ratio, TBC.

The ranging PRNG had a bit rate of 992Kbps, sequence length about 5.5M,
for a 5.5 second repeat interval. It was composed of either a short code
or a long code, each produced from shift-register feedback generators of
various lengths. The short codes were 11,15,31,63 bits, and the long
codes were 11,31,63,127 bits. Ranging consisted of sending these in turn
and correlating each one (receiver had a delayed copy of the PRNGs). The
best correlation yielded a "Chinese number" (c.f. Chinese remainder
theorem) that was added in to start correlation using the next longer
sequence.

This was capable of range accuracy around 20cm at lunar distance, a
spectacular achievement at the time.

The ranging data was used for trajectory estimation (by variation from
the calculated path), because the earth baseline wasn't long enough for
accurate triangulation.

More details as I get them.

Clifford Heath.

Do you think the moon landing would have been possible/feasible if the transistor had not yet been invented? Sometimes I wonder how limited we are with the current technology.

Difficult to imagine. Think about the guidance computer for example.

The Russians did it without even having a global tracking network.
They didn't seem to mind wasting astronauts though.

> I recall meeting some guys who worked at NASA facility in Florida. They claimed that even today (well, 10 years ago) there was no off the shelf technology that would substitute for the TTL logic based design they used to tie all the control center equipment together with the same level of fault protection and speed/latency. It was pretty interesting.

The IBM computers on the ground were heavily transistorised.

There were no transistors that could do S-band RF of course. So even
though the ranging achieved about 2 wavelengths accuracy, it was done
with a bit rate under 1Mbps - just low-jitter edges.

Clifford Heath.

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 22/7/19 10:27 am, Lasse Langwadt Christensen wrote:

mandag den 22. juli 2019 kl. 02.23.21 UTC+2 skrev Clifford Heath:
On 18/7/19 6:33 pm, gregz wrote:
Michael Terrell <terrell.michael.a@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sunday, July 14, 2019 at 11:32:44 AM UTC-4, amdx wrote:
On 7/14/2019 8:59 AM, Cursitor Doom wrote:
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the 'first manned moon landing' as
it were, I'm just wondering what proportion of the group believe the
whole thing was just an elaborate hoax for whatever reason?
The question is just to stupid to entertain.
But I have to ad, this morning I saw the seamstresses from Platex even
got in on the hoax of sewing moon suits together.
I was about 14 then and my mom let me stay up late to watch it.
I remember how crummy the video was.

The video was slow scan, due to the transmit power requirements. Higher
bandwidth required more power than was available. It was also heavier
than they could take on the mission. You can only get so much gain from the antennas.

Slow scan allowed the video to be transmitted on an audio channel. Once
it was received on earth, it was scan converted, to let the public see
it. It was crappy video, or nothing.

Amateur radio operators still use Slow Scan video on the HF and VHF bands.

It's been decades, but I think it was eight seconds per frame for Amateur
radio, to fit into a 5KHz audio channel. One commercial product was 'Robot'?

Some use NTSC video at higher frequencies. Some old CATV modulators are
on the proper bands, and are used with an amplifier for ATV.

It was my impression video was transmitted as PCM digital data,

Incorrect. I wrote down many of the facts, direct from the Honeysuckle
engineers involved at the time, with whom I shared lunch just yesterday.
I have email addresses and phone numbers, and a promise from at least
one of them to scan and send the original documentation after their
return home. Bernard Smith was most helpful (he has amazing recall of
the details!), and Keith Brockelsby helped.

There was one S-band uplink (IIRC 2282.5MHz) modulated with:
* a 30KHz FM audio subcarrier
* a 70KHz biphase modulated command (data) channel,
* direct carrier phase modulation from the ranging PRNG
* Doppler from the relative velocity

The spacecraft receiver demodulated the ranging signal and directly
applied it to the transmit carrier. I have not been able to find out
whether that signal was squared-up (adding phase noise) before
re-transmitting. Ranging data was used to calibrate and separate the
Doppler vs oscillator drift.

There were two S-band downlink signals, one for TV, the other with a
1.024KHz telemetry signal and a 1.125MHz audio carrier. The telemetry
downlink was frequency-synthesised from the uplink frequency, using
analog phase locking. A ratio of 240/221 was mentioned and I think this
was the ratio, TBC.

The ranging PRNG had a bit rate of 992Kbps, sequence length about 5.5M,
for a 5.5 second repeat interval. It was composed of either a short code
or a long code, each produced from shift-register feedback generators of
various lengths. The short codes were 11,15,31,63 bits, and the long
codes were 11,31,63,127 bits. Ranging consisted of sending these in turn
and correlating each one (receiver had a delayed copy of the PRNGs). The
best correlation yielded a "Chinese number" (c.f. Chinese remainder
theorem) that was added in to start correlation using the next longer
sequence.

This was capable of range accuracy around 20cm at lunar distance, a
spectacular achievement at the time.

The ranging data was used for trajectory estimation (by variation from
the calculated path), because the earth baseline wasn't long enough for
accurate triangulation.

More details as I get them.

Clifford Heath.

https://youtu.be/2yW3GW_6LBM

Yes. I suggested to Dave that he make that video, and introduced him to
the folk who could have given him the details - but he couldn't grab any
of them (I did though!). Also to Stan Anderson (who was the fleet
commander of the Snoopy aeroplanes, not just an "operator" as Dave says)
the interview subject of another of Dave's videos.

Clifford Heath.

 

On Mon, 22 Jul 2019 01:22:03 +0000 (UTC),
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:

Clifford Heath <no.spam@please.net> wrote in news:sy7ZE.40412$472.6431
@fx12.iad:

The final crash site of the discarded Apollo 11 LEM is still unknown,
despite years of high-resolution mapping. Strange, because the
footprints are clearly visible.

Huh? Crash site?

No. They LANDED the ENTIRE LEM. They launched leaving behind the
LEM base. All of the Apolla landing sites are known. Nothing is
missing. Nothing was 'discarded'. All of our gear still up on the
Moon is still all our gear. We discarded nor relenquished ownership of
none of it.

AlwaysWrong, you must work really hard to be this consistently wrong!
Did they come home? Then the LEM Isn't at the landing site, you
moron! They crashed the LEM into the moon after returning to the
command module. The shock waves were then seen on the seismometers
left on the moon.

 

[Rick C]

On Sunday, July 21, 2019 at 9:47:13 PM UTC-4, k...@notreal.com wrote:

AlwaysWrong, you must work really hard to be this consistently wrong!
Did they come home? Then the LEM Isn't at the landing site, you
moron!

You are both right. The LM has two parts, the descent stage and the ascent stage. Only the ascent stage leaves the moon. The descent stage remains at the landing site.

They crashed the LEM into the moon after returning to the
command module. The shock waves were then seen on the seismometers
left on the moon.

It's pretty interesting that there were seven separate stages of the Apollo mission vehicles. Only one safely returns to the earth.

I also found out that the service module was supposed to fire thrusters to make sure it did not pass anywhere near the deorbiting command module. There was a design problem so this didn't work. On reentry the Apollo 11 crew saw the service module fly past them as they descended, so it ended up in front of them as it disintegrated in the atmosphere. Potentially any part of the service module could have impacted the descending command module resulting in the death of the astronauts.

--

Rick C.

-+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[bitrex]

On 7/22/19 12:49 AM, bitrex wrote:

On 7/21/19 11:01 PM, Rick C wrote:
On Sunday, July 21, 2019 at 9:47:13 PM UTC-4, k...@notreal.com wrote:

AlwaysWrong, you must work really hard to be this consistently wrong!
Did they come home?  Then the LEM Isn't at the landing site, you
moron!

You are both right.  The LM has two parts, the descent stage and the
ascent stage.  Only the ascent stage leaves the moon.  The descent
stage remains at the landing site.


They crashed the LEM into the moon after returning to the
command module.  The shock waves were then seen on the seismometers
left on the moon.

It's pretty interesting that there were seven separate stages of the
Apollo mission vehicles.  Only one safely returns to the earth.

I also found out that the service module was supposed to fire
thrusters to make sure it did not pass anywhere near the deorbiting
command module.  There was a design problem so this didn't work.  On
reentry the Apollo 11 crew saw the service module fly past them as
they descended, so it ended up in front of them as it disintegrated in
the atmosphere.  Potentially any part of the service module could have
impacted the descending command module resulting in the death of the
astronauts.


https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/

This one time I got my first Kerbal into orbit on a Mercury-like rocket
successfully, unfortunately I forgot to mount retro-rockets on the
capsule to de-orbit it. Ooops.

Having the little guy jump outside for a little space-walk and give the
capsule a good "shove" with the jets on his backpack, vaguely in the
direction of the ground, seemed to do the trick along with atmospheric
drag after about another three or four days of orbits. I hope he had snacks

Hell, in case of emergency you don't even need the capsule to get back
home. Just pull the rip-cord on your inflatable heat shield, strap the
spacesuit to the rear and do it live:

<https://newatlas.com/inflatable-heat-shield/23416/>

 

[bitrex]

On 7/21/19 11:01 PM, Rick C wrote:

On Sunday, July 21, 2019 at 9:47:13 PM UTC-4, k...@notreal.com wrote:

AlwaysWrong, you must work really hard to be this consistently wrong!
Did they come home? Then the LEM Isn't at the landing site, you
moron!

You are both right. The LM has two parts, the descent stage and the ascent stage. Only the ascent stage leaves the moon. The descent stage remains at the landing site.


They crashed the LEM into the moon after returning to the
command module. The shock waves were then seen on the seismometers
left on the moon.

It's pretty interesting that there were seven separate stages of the Apollo mission vehicles. Only one safely returns to the earth.

I also found out that the service module was supposed to fire thrusters to make sure it did not pass anywhere near the deorbiting command module. There was a design problem so this didn't work. On reentry the Apollo 11 crew saw the service module fly past them as they descended, so it ended up in front of them as it disintegrated in the atmosphere. Potentially any part of the service module could have impacted the descending command module resulting in the death of the astronauts.

<https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/>

This one time I got my first Kerbal into orbit on a Mercury-like rocket
successfully, unfortunately I forgot to mount retro-rockets on the
capsule to de-orbit it. Ooops.

Having the little guy jump outside for a little space-walk and give the
capsule a good "shove" with the jets on his backpack, vaguely in the
direction of the ground, seemed to do the trick along with atmospheric
drag after about another three or four days of orbits. I hope he had snacks

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 10:52:36 AM UTC+10, Rick C wrote:

On Sunday, July 21, 2019 at 8:23:21 PM UTC-4, Clifford Heath wrote:

Incorrect. I wrote down many of the facts, direct from the Honeysuckle
engineers involved at the time, with whom I shared lunch just yesterday..
I have email addresses and phone numbers, and a promise from at least
one of them to scan and send the original documentation after their
return home. Bernard Smith was most helpful (he has amazing recall of
the details!), and Keith Brockelsby helped.

There was one S-band uplink (IIRC 2282.5MHz) modulated with:
* a 30KHz FM audio subcarrier
* a 70KHz biphase modulated command (data) channel,
* direct carrier phase modulation from the ranging PRNG
* Doppler from the relative velocity

The spacecraft receiver demodulated the ranging signal and directly
applied it to the transmit carrier. I have not been able to find out
whether that signal was squared-up (adding phase noise) before
re-transmitting. Ranging data was used to calibrate and separate the
Doppler vs oscillator drift.

There were two S-band downlink signals, one for TV, the other with a
1.024KHz telemetry signal and a 1.125MHz audio carrier. The telemetry
downlink was frequency-synthesised from the uplink frequency, using
analog phase locking. A ratio of 240/221 was mentioned and I think this
was the ratio, TBC.

The ranging PRNG had a bit rate of 992Kbps, sequence length about 5.5M,
for a 5.5 second repeat interval. It was composed of either a short code
or a long code, each produced from shift-register feedback generators of
various lengths. The short codes were 11,15,31,63 bits, and the long
codes were 11,31,63,127 bits. Ranging consisted of sending these in turn
and correlating each one (receiver had a delayed copy of the PRNGs). The
best correlation yielded a "Chinese number" (c.f. Chinese remainder
theorem) that was added in to start correlation using the next longer
sequence.

This was capable of range accuracy around 20cm at lunar distance, a
spectacular achievement at the time.

The ranging data was used for trajectory estimation (by variation from
the calculated path), because the earth baseline wasn't long enough for
accurate triangulation.

More details as I get them.

Clifford Heath.

Do you think the moon landing would have been possible/feasible if the transistor had not yet been invented? Sometimes I wonder how limited we are with the current technology.

I recall meeting some guys who worked at NASA facility in Florida. They claimed that even today (well, 10 years ago) there was no off the shelf technology that would substitute for the TTL logic based design they used to tie all the control center equipment together with the same level of fault protection and speed/latency. It was pretty interesting.

You could do anything that MSI TTL could do with enough discrete transistors.

One of my colleagues at Kent Instruments at Luton (1973-1976) had built a 128bit shift register as a stack of printed circuit boards loaded with discrete transistors. He had been working for Peter Baxandall at the Royal Radar Establishment at Malvern at the time. The small market for that kind of gear - at the price it ended up costing - meant that it wasn't available off the shelf as such.

Hardware that used that approach - like the first PDP-8 - was, and had been for a decade or so by then.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Rob]

gregz <zekor@comcast.net> wrote:

There were cameras pointed at TV, including 8mm film, and still film shots.
It's not clear to me a video camera was used, but a scan converter was used
for the TV broadcast, and this was also videotaped.

There was no way they could build a scan converter from SSTV to NTSC
in hardware in those days.
Back then a scan converter was just a camera in front of a CRT.

And of course the setup of the whole thing was extremely tricky.
That is visible in the quality of the received pictures: both the
contrast and the back-level were completely wrong.

After some time the picture switches from the Honeysuckle Creek receiver
site to the Parkes site, where the converter apparently was aligned
a lot better (of courst the could tweak it while the other signal was
being broadcast), and it also had better SNR due to the larger dish.

But the picture quality still sucked. It is likely that when the original
recordings of the SSTV signal had been preserved, we could make a much
better scan conversion today. But the tapes have been lost.

 

[gregz]

Clifford Heath <no.spam@please.net> wrote:

On 22/7/19 10:27 am, Lasse Langwadt Christensen wrote:
mandag den 22. juli 2019 kl. 02.23.21 UTC+2 skrev Clifford Heath:
On 18/7/19 6:33 pm, gregz wrote:
Michael Terrell <terrell.michael.a@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sunday, July 14, 2019 at 11:32:44 AM UTC-4, amdx wrote:
On 7/14/2019 8:59 AM, Cursitor Doom wrote:
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the 'first manned moon landing' as
it were, I'm just wondering what proportion of the group believe the
whole thing was just an elaborate hoax for whatever reason?
The question is just to stupid to entertain.
But I have to ad, this morning I saw the seamstresses from Platex even
got in on the hoax of sewing moon suits together.
I was about 14 then and my mom let me stay up late to watch it.
I remember how crummy the video was.

The video was slow scan, due to the transmit power requirements. Higher
bandwidth required more power than was available. It was also heavier
than they could take on the mission. You can only get so much gain from the antennas.

Slow scan allowed the video to be transmitted on an audio channel. Once
it was received on earth, it was scan converted, to let the public see
it. It was crappy video, or nothing.

Amateur radio operators still use Slow Scan video on the HF and VHF bands.

It's been decades, but I think it was eight seconds per frame for Amateur
radio, to fit into a 5KHz audio channel. One commercial product was 'Robot'?

Some use NTSC video at higher frequencies. Some old CATV modulators are
on the proper bands, and are used with an amplifier for ATV.

It was my impression video was transmitted as PCM digital data,

Incorrect. I wrote down many of the facts, direct from the Honeysuckle
engineers involved at the time, with whom I shared lunch just yesterday.
I have email addresses and phone numbers, and a promise from at least
one of them to scan and send the original documentation after their
return home. Bernard Smith was most helpful (he has amazing recall of
the details!), and Keith Brockelsby helped.

There was one S-band uplink (IIRC 2282.5MHz) modulated with:
* a 30KHz FM audio subcarrier
* a 70KHz biphase modulated command (data) channel,
* direct carrier phase modulation from the ranging PRNG
* Doppler from the relative velocity

The spacecraft receiver demodulated the ranging signal and directly
applied it to the transmit carrier. I have not been able to find out
whether that signal was squared-up (adding phase noise) before
re-transmitting. Ranging data was used to calibrate and separate the
Doppler vs oscillator drift.

There were two S-band downlink signals, one for TV, the other with a
1.024KHz telemetry signal and a 1.125MHz audio carrier. The telemetry
downlink was frequency-synthesised from the uplink frequency, using
analog phase locking. A ratio of 240/221 was mentioned and I think this
was the ratio, TBC.

The ranging PRNG had a bit rate of 992Kbps, sequence length about 5.5M,
for a 5.5 second repeat interval. It was composed of either a short code
or a long code, each produced from shift-register feedback generators of
various lengths. The short codes were 11,15,31,63 bits, and the long
codes were 11,31,63,127 bits. Ranging consisted of sending these in turn
and correlating each one (receiver had a delayed copy of the PRNGs). The
best correlation yielded a "Chinese number" (c.f. Chinese remainder
theorem) that was added in to start correlation using the next longer
sequence.

This was capable of range accuracy around 20cm at lunar distance, a
spectacular achievement at the time.

The ranging data was used for trajectory estimation (by variation from
the calculated path), because the earth baseline wasn't long enough for
accurate triangulation.

More details as I get them.

Clifford Heath.
https://youtu.be/2yW3GW_6LBM

I worked on that MK1 ranging machine by General Dynamics. It used dynamic
logic, where a signal was a one, and no signal a zero. It had soldered
board contacts, where if mission critical problems, you banged on it. I
forget if that was still used on Apollo/Soyuz because sometime later they
switched o tone ranging. Seems like Bill Wood was going down There, a
Goldstone engineer. Pretty amazing guy.

Greg

Yes. I suggested to Dave that he make that video, and introduced him to
the folk who could have given him the details - but he couldn't grab any
of them (I did though!). Also to Stan Anderson (who was the fleet
commander of the Snoopy aeroplanes, not just an "operator" as Dave says)
the interview subject of another of Dave's videos.

Clifford Heath.

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 23/7/19 6:49 pm, gregz wrote:

Clifford Heath <no.spam@please.net> wrote:
More details as I get them.

I worked on that MK1 ranging machine by General Dynamics. It used dynamic
logic, where a signal was a one, and no signal a zero. It had soldered
board contacts, where if mission critical problems, you banged on it. I
forget if that was still used on Apollo/Soyuz because sometime later they
switched o tone ranging. Seems like Bill Wood was going down There, a
Goldstone engineer. Pretty amazing guy.

Mike Dinn just got back to me about Mike, saying:

"Bill had an engineering career at Goldstone - Manned Flight and Deep
Space. A very competent engineer - I knew him well. He’s been to other
reunions, but couldn’t make this cos of medical problems. He’s written
the best essay on Apollo and TV:
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/ApolloTV-Acrobat5.pdf"

Clifford Heath.

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Wed, 24 Jul 2019 14:28:46 +1000) it happened Clifford Heath
<no.spam@please.net> wrote in <28RZE.67375$qC7.18222@fx11.iad>:

On 23/7/19 6:49 pm, gregz wrote:
Clifford Heath <no.spam@please.net> wrote:
More details as I get them.

I worked on that MK1 ranging machine by General Dynamics. It used dynamic
logic, where a signal was a one, and no signal a zero. It had soldered
board contacts, where if mission critical problems, you banged on it. I
forget if that was still used on Apollo/Soyuz because sometime later they
switched o tone ranging. Seems like Bill Wood was going down There, a
Goldstone engineer. Pretty amazing guy.

Mike Dinn just got back to me about Mike, saying:

"Bill had an engineering career at Goldstone - Manned Flight and Deep
Space. A very competent engineer - I knew him well. He’s been to other
reunions, but couldn’t make this cos of medical problems. He’s written
the best essay on Apollo and TV:
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/ApolloTV-Acrobat5.pdf"

Clifford Heath.

Thank you very much for that paper.
Brings back the amazing old days.

Strange they made that gamma correction error,
probably when scientists do not understand video.

I also clearly remember that problem with that camera pointed at the sun and it no longer working.
We had whole discussions here about that, adjusting cameras was one part of my job
back then.

Would be nice to back to the moon with modern CCD an CMOS cameras, see how that behaves,
High resolution, difficult lighting, bit of an invasion of seagulls yesterday,
strange they are here this time of the year, normally only in winter looking for food:
http://panteltje.com/pub/meeuwen_hd_IXIMG_0083.JPG
scroll

 

[piglet]

On 24/07/2019 9:22 am, Clifford Heath wrote:

That was a Westinghouse colour camera that Alan Bean pointed at the sun
while mounting it on the tripod. Not the B&W mono camera from RCA that
went with A11. But I guess you knew that.

Clifford Heath.

Was that the one with the rotating colour-wheel?

piglet

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 24/7/19 5:13 pm, Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Wed, 24 Jul 2019 14:28:46 +1000) it happened Clifford Heath
no.spam@please.net> wrote in <28RZE.67375$qC7.18222@fx11.iad>:
"Bill had an engineering career at Goldstone - Manned Flight and Deep
Space. A very competent engineer - I knew him well. He’s been to other
reunions, but couldn’t make this cos of medical problems. He’s written
the best essay on Apollo and TV:
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/ApolloTV-Acrobat5.pdf"
Thank you very much for that paper.
Brings back the amazing old days.

Strange they made that gamma correction error,
probably when scientists do not understand video.

I also clearly remember that problem with that camera pointed at the sun and it no longer working.

That was a Westinghouse colour camera that Alan Bean pointed at the sun
while mounting it on the tripod. Not the B&W mono camera from RCA that
went with A11. But I guess you knew that.

Clifford Heath.

 

[gregz]

Clifford Heath <no.spam@please.net> wrote:

On 23/7/19 6:49 pm, gregz wrote:
Clifford Heath <no.spam@please.net> wrote:
More details as I get them.

I worked on that MK1 ranging machine by General Dynamics. It used dynamic
logic, where a signal was a one, and no signal a zero. It had soldered
board contacts, where if mission critical problems, you banged on it. I
forget if that was still used on Apollo/Soyuz because sometime later they
switched o tone ranging. Seems like Bill Wood was going down There, a
Goldstone engineer. Pretty amazing guy.

Mike Dinn just got back to me about Mike, saying:

"Bill had an engineering career at Goldstone - Manned Flight and Deep
Space. A very competent engineer - I knew him well. He’s been to other
reunions, but couldn’t make this cos of medical problems. He’s written
the best essay on Apollo and TV: https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/ApolloTV-Acrobat5.pdf"

Clifford Heath.

I believe he PDFed the whole station equipment description SPF or something
like that I don't know off hand. Sorry to hear of medical problems.

Greg

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Wed, 24 Jul 2019 18:22:13 +1000) it happened Clifford Heath
<no.spam@please.net> wrote in <YyUZE.213601$5i.93589@fx46.iad>:

On 24/7/19 5:13 pm, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Wed, 24 Jul 2019 14:28:46 +1000) it happened Clifford Heath
no.spam@please.net> wrote in <28RZE.67375$qC7.18222@fx11.iad>:
"Bill had an engineering career at Goldstone - Manned Flight and Deep
Space. A very competent engineer - I knew him well. He’s been to other
reunions, but couldn’t make this cos of medical problems. He’s written
the best essay on Apollo and TV:
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/ApolloTV-Acrobat5.pdf"
Thank you very much for that paper.
Brings back the amazing old days.

Strange they made that gamma correction error,
probably when scientists do not understand video.

I also clearly remember that problem with that camera pointed at the sun and it no longer working.

That was a Westinghouse colour camera that Alan Bean pointed at the sun
while mounting it on the tripod. Not the B&W mono camera from RCA that
went with A11. But I guess you knew that.

From what I remeber we (I ?) thought the color wheel was burned,
but it now seems the tube target electrode was damaged.
Vidicons were (was it a vidicon?) very sensitive to burn in.
Those were used here in film editing tables, and after some time those had burn in
and needed to be replaced.
Also I did not know they used an image intensifier.

The head control room here, in the Netherlands, was in the old Vitus studio
in Bussum, that studio later burned down.
It was a TV studio, recording room, and above that the head control room.
We recorded in the 1968 or so on these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ampex_VR1000A_(serial_329).jpg
2 inch quadruplex.
Those had also still tubes in it ....
Was a beast to keep running, racks full of tubes, that in the picture is only the console...
After that place burned down all operations and we were moved to the media park in Hilversum.
Recording was then on VR2000:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ampex_VR-2000_20131126.jpg

Funny the paper mentions the harddisk slow motion storage at some point,
we had the HS100, a huge disc used for slow motion replay with 4 R/W heads moving in sequence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampex#/media/File:HS-100-deck-ampex.jpg
I even went a week to Germany for a traning to service that machine,
As there was building work being done the disc would crash at unxpected times due to building dust.
It was later modified with a sealed plasic housing and a pump with air filter.
I remeber replacing disks...
Lots going on, also went 3 weeks to Germany for the AVR1, their later automatic 2 inch recorder:
http://www.akdart.com/vtr/jpeg/21-07a.jpg


There is more, do not get me started.
That AVR1 was defective by default when you switched it on in the morning.
So we finally decided to leave it on over night
Still took quite a few people to keep it running, was the first one with digital storage done by
switching differrent length delay lines to counter head position switching skew and timing errors.
Better stop here.