Stan Lebar and his team at Westinghouse developed the original Apollo camera. They'd made a miniature camera for the CIA which is why they were chosen by NASA. Stan was at the early Television museum in 2009 and talked about it Long video, most in the later part. Sadly he passed away not long afterwards. That's him pictured with the camera. The later Apollo camera(after 15) was RCA I believe. th-cam.com/video/Hjxi6r6TPr4/w-d-xo.html
"Looking where the bad smell was coming from" is a phrase that would utterly confuse most non electronics nerds, but makes perfect sense to those who know :D Reminds me of an occasion when I was working for a company that did electronics repairs on anything and everything. I had an old audio amplifier come in for a quote and the boss commented to me that "It looks like a pretty vintage piece of gear". I took a sniff at one of the ventilation grilles, and replied to him "Yep, my guess is mid 70s, by the smell". He was amused/confused by this, especially when we later found ~1974 date codes on many components.. Anyone who's worked on enough of a range of old electronics will know what I mean.. Each era has it's own unique smell, and different failed components certainly have their own distinct "bad" smells!
@@MeriaDuck It's all fun and games until you have a TO92 outline branded into your finger tips. Those little fuckers can get surprisingly hot before they blow up.
Yes, worked on equipment that was hermetically sealed, and the smell would make it through the seals when it went into well cooked mode, a known failure mode that did occur on the power supply. Last thing to fail then would be the 3 mains fuses, when the transformer finally cooked itself, to the point it hard shorted. Fix was to order new power supplies, at a price that you thought they were made from solid Plutonium, because the same volume of gold would have been a lot cheaper.
Interesting. Why? I was one of the operators of the Apollo scan converter at Fresnedillas (Spain) during 11, 12 and 13). There are many more components used for converting from slow scan to NTSC. Glad somebody explains. Thanks for bringing memories...
In Sweden we had our own legendary TV commentator, Bengt Feldreich, who guided the audience through the moon landing broadcast. He once told that he had this conversation with an aroused viewer afterwards: "I saw the Moon landing on TV." "Yes, wasn''t it amazing?" "What do you mean? I have a complaint. It was all in black-and-white! I have a color TV!" I love to recall that anecdote when I as an engineer encounter a certain kind of customer...
Imagine if they would have had the technology back in the day (And Rick Astley had already been a thing): Millions of people all over the world watching this historic moment, and just as he takes the first step - in comes Rick Astley. That would have been the ultimate rickroll xD
@@duderobi Even if, he would have been a toddler at this point. So one would have to take a time machine back and hack the broadcast. And then nobody from the time period would get the joke, probably. But it would be funny nonetheless.
I wish the moon-hoax people could really understand all the incredibly awesome engineering that went into the whole Apollo porgram. All the millions and millions of small details that super smart people burned countless cups of coffee on to get it working. Also, there shoud be a TH-cam Nerdfest get-together. You guys, Adam Savage, and so on, all in a big building.
How do you know they can't, what you don't understand, is the public wasn't allowed to see what they actually filmed on the moon. Are you people really super smart? The people employing you and running this charade are even smarter because the technological dividends were huge.
The 'hoax' is a cover for what was seen on the moon, you can hear it yourself listening to the right tapes. Nothing is really hidden if you aren't a 50iq simpleton.
@@N4CR which tapes are those. the Ham radio tapes? the only way I know what they saw is some people have extracted images from the negatives after they airbrushed features from the sky on some originally released photos.
A short tantalum cap - shock news ;) Years ago I used to work on Link TV cameras.......short tants were a pretty much the first port of call. The camera plug in boards had low value inductors in the voltage rails, so usually, the inductors were blown, and then it was just a case of looking for the split tanty. As Mike rightly said, they usually let a bit of molten tantalum out along with the smoke..... My most memorable failed tant was in a Studer A80 tape machine. When first switched on in the morning it went into fast forward and wouldn't respond to any controls for about 10 minutes...then it would stop and behave perfectly until the next time it was switched off for a few hours. Eventually traced to a tant that re-formed after volts were applied but went short after relaxing for a few hours. Happy days.....
We have a Vanguard arcade machine at the museum. The speech would only work whenever it felt like it. Sometimes speech, sometimes not and always some weird crackly noise in the background. I pulled the tantalums coupling the speech audio into the op-amp mixing with the rest of the system and measured them with the Testofon (cue elevator music: This is a displayless tester that converts measurement current into audio frequency, so anything you measure gives off a specific audible signature and after a while of using it you can say, that's a diode; that's a 10k resistor; that's a 470µF capacitor; this capacitor is leaky...) and instead of the cap being short or breaking down at a certain voltage, it was all over the place, I got half a melody out of it, and it wouldn't stop or settle! And then there was a pinball machine (Game Plan's Pinball Lizard) where the sound would work fine but after about an hour, when you started a game, it went into that drum loop and never got out - it was waiting for the ball shoot signal to go into normal sound effects mode, but that signal had to go through a pulse shaper that used - you guessed it - a tantalum. That said, Tantalums usually work perfectly fine or they break down at a certain voltage or they are just plain shorted.
Just discovered this wonderful channel and have been watching some of the Apollo-related videos, especially the AGC series. The US space program, and especially Apollo was a huge inspiration to me and my friends at school during the 1960s and influenced our career choices in electronics and computing. We knew the technology was advanced, but we had no real understanding of it, nor how it would influence the future. These videos have provided so much insight into those achievements and I’m even more impressed now than I was as a child more than 50 years ago. Thank you, Marc and the whole team!
This channel is educational , entertaining and hypnotic ! Can't take my eyes until the end of your videos ! Cheers Marc and your team ! Keep the videos coming please !
Something interesting to note that is related is the recovery of the 1969 landing footage and how that method is now used for modern archival for analogue colour under tapes such as VHS, Video8, High8, Beta formats and so on, by directly digitising the original modulated signals Video/HiFi etc and post demodulating and time base correcting them actual 1:1 tape backup is possible with incredible precision of decoding and manipulating this is all doable by anyone now for sub 100USD of china ADC hardware and tools thanks to VHS-Decode witch spawned from LD-Decode to recover the Domesday disks made by the BBC in the 80's.
This series is just a gem, it belongs right there with all the (still available) tapes as historic significant things. Thanks for making these! And what a testament to the equipment.
Yep, that's exactly what it was. On one of the test boxes, there is even a knob to adjust the DC bias of the TV, probably for that very reason to avoid a shift.
Marc, I'm a big fan of your hobby and your work sharing it with us. The extra effort to capture your process, your narration and occasionally explanatory cutaways are really appreciated. I'm happy every time you figure something out, or get something working again. These videos are the next best thing to being there in the room.
I was only searching for this kind of information on the first TV broadcasts from the moon, a few weeks back here on TH-cam! Thanks so much for all the hard work you guys put into making these videos - it's amazing stuff.
Dammit - I just made a comment about the operating hours counter sounding exactly like the panels in Star Trek TOS (because Marc inserted a caption into the video saying that the noise comes from these, it's at the 6:00 mark) - you beat me to it.
23:16 outta hook an fpga to the video output to digitize it so you can capture the raw signals on a computer, which would be the best way possible to determine how well the picture does look
I love the low-tech way the slow-scan to NTSC converter works. And, of course, at the end, Curious Marc Rickrolls from the moon (or a reasonable facsimile thereof.) Well played!
Surveillance cameras still use NTSC (or PAL) today. Although 16:9 images are transmitted, the analog bases are still used. Twisted wires are sufficient for the wiring.
Maaan, I understand 10% of the theory here but it is fascinating to see the design decisions and standards created in the 60's. Great job Marc and team.
It’s very funny. When I was working on digital video capture in the early 90s I was using the same techniques of reduced resolution and dropping the frame rates to cut the bitrates. No idea Apollo has trodden the same track 3 decades earlier. 😂
If you can find an SDR that operates below 600kHz. Anyways it would be more appropriate to construct a traditional circuit with currently made components and using the fact that computer graphics card from the 1990s can produce component signals at nearly arbitrary frequencies and resolutions by simply setting the clock dividers in SVGA registers. The component video at 320 lines nominal, 10 fps would be fed into the reconstructed camera circuit to output the high efficiency waveform with 500kHz sync bursts then fed to the transmitter. On the receiving end, 1980s green computer monitors may feature the needed slow phosphors, needing only a traditional circuit to detect the sync pulses and output separate sync and chroma signals for the detuned monitor.
When you give the hardware back to their owners, also hand them a copy of all the videos you made restoring it. Maybe even the raw material and a copy of Ken's blog. This is invaluable information for future generations. And please use some storage that won't die after two years on the shelf. I heard stone is known to last millennia.
11:35 Original recordings of slow scan footage were not wiped, they were sold to a NASA intern. You can find the NBC News report about the discovery if you search "Original Recorded Footage Of The Moon Landing Found"
Yes, there are many problems, with original photos and footage being lost, how much of this has to occur before people realize where there's smoke, there's a fire? They had to cover up the real missions.
Amazing that the vidicon was still ok! Probably was in a dark room or storage. Specially because there was no lens cap over the optics. I remember from the time I worked with those cameras that the tubes still wore down, even when not used if not protected. P.S. be careful with point source lichts, as led lamps, the burnin is really a problem with these tubes.
Hey, younger TV director who missed the analog era here! I see in concert videos from the late 70s and 80s that the camera operator sometimes gets the stage lighting in frame, creates some vaguely psychedelic trailing effect, but it doesn't seem to "burn in". Did some tubes have a way to mitigate that damage caused by point sources or were otherwise just less susceptible to that kind of damage?
@@Aquatarkus96 Those trails around bright spots are a common effect of a plumbicon camera tube. Some tubes though can be destroyed by bright light sources, like some really sensitive photomultiplier tubes. I don't personally think that TV tubes would suffer from an indirect exposure to light. They generally didn't have a great lifespan as the image became too dull for broadcasting pretty soon.
@@Aquatarkus96 Burn in is a problem if you intentionally or accidentally point it at the sun. Afaik some space tech has actually been destroyed like that. It's worth a google. Stage lights don't seem to be that much of an issue, though i wouldn't point the camera at a spot light, arc lamp or whatever either.
I love how you have this much enthusiasm about the whole thing. This makes it so much easier to understand it when you explain the black magic to a common pleb like me^^ Also, if given the opportunity, would you dare to take on a complete command module in unknown state, or would such a project be to big for a small crew like you have?
This makes me wonder where and how and where they converted the slow scan tv image into a 50 fields/s image for pal/secam countries (and even 405-lines for the UK?). Was there a second scan converter that worked with the SSTV signal? or did they work with the NTSC signal? TV standards conversion already seems to be an awefully complicated problem for 1969...doing it live seems even more complicated.
Have been really enjoying this series, even if I can only follow the in-depth electronics at a very high level. Was even saying to myself, 'but you must show the Earth from the Moon' and the (Master) Ken had the same idea. More great work from the CuriousMarc team! What a shame there are no recordings of the original slow-scan footage - the stills you showed clearly show what was possible compared with the transformed footage that was broadcast. I was too young to remember the moon landings (I’d have been about 3) but presumably a further transformation would’ve been made for broadcast here in Britain.
There was no provision for recording slow scan TV. Only after converting to NTSC. For this we had an Ampex 600, and the tapes were flown in a daily basis to Goddar, so we had nothing as record. However, there was a still camera pointing to the slow scan internal monitor and many pictures were taken. I still have one of them.
I only watch these to see if they can get any nerdier, and I'm NEVER disappointed!🤣 It is a crying shame that the original slow-scans were taped over. Hey, NASA! The next time some bean-counter suggests something so utterly stupid just to save a few bucks, launch him into orbit.!
Don't feel too bad. According to Mark Stein and apparently Viva Frei the landings never happened. The equipment displayed on this video does not exist. It has been a cover up all along.
9:27 so it wasn't that they didn't have enough bandwidth, but that they needed it for other tasks 🤔 (and couldn't do both with the hardware they could send to orbit) We are so spoiled nowadays with our Gigabits networks 😅 Did they ever put a second amplifier tube in the later missions or maybe the famous wheel-color system the other cameras used didn't need it? Because I heard that, besides color, they also improved the quality, so they must have used some more bandwidth...
It’s a complicated story, but they built a sequential color camera with reduced bandwidth characteristics and stomped right over the voice and data, then filtered it back out using a very advanced scheme on the ground. To be explained in the next video on the topic. They also added a high gain deployable antenna on the Moon and used the Goldstone giant dish on the ground. Quite an affair to get color…
Hilarious how TH-cam puts the Wikipedia link for the Apollo program at the top of the video. The real info is right here, still being recovered with every vid
That’s because we use the Command Module FM scheme, explained in the video around 8:55. Turns out you can also do in the LM, and they eventually did, but you need some elaborate filtering and carrier suppression techniques.
@@CuriousMarc Thank you! I think I get it now! I do analog video work so I feel a serious need to understand it for continuing education. Your work here is Monumental!!
Stan Lebar and his team at Westinghouse developed the original Apollo camera. They'd made a miniature camera for the CIA which is why they were chosen by NASA.
Stan was at the early Television museum in 2009 and talked about it Long video, most in the later part.
Sadly he passed away not long afterwards. That's him pictured with the camera.
The later Apollo camera(after 15) was RCA I believe.
th-cam.com/video/Hjxi6r6TPr4/w-d-xo.html
Yes, that’s Stan Lebar in the short video snippet with his camera.
Oh and thanks for the link, it sheds some light on the high resolution still mode that never got used. I was wondering about that too.
Oeh thanks for the link, that's fascinating! As is the museum btw
One small step for a Marc, but a giant steep for Nerdkind.
Hahaha
One giant leap for rickrolling
Yeah, small step for many geeks also XD
The year is 2035 curiousmarc has banded together with a team of engineers and has restored a full Saturn v to full working condition
An LVDC would be interesting to see restored, and could happen a lot sooner than 2035.
if NASA keeps delaying the launch of Artemis they really mount Saturn V and launch first.
"Looking where the bad smell was coming from" is a phrase that would utterly confuse most non electronics nerds, but makes perfect sense to those who know :D
Reminds me of an occasion when I was working for a company that did electronics repairs on anything and everything. I had an old audio amplifier come in for a quote and the boss commented to me that "It looks like a pretty vintage piece of gear". I took a sniff at one of the ventilation grilles, and replied to him "Yep, my guess is mid 70s, by the smell". He was amused/confused by this, especially when we later found ~1974 date codes on many components..
Anyone who's worked on enough of a range of old electronics will know what I mean.. Each era has it's own unique smell, and different failed components certainly have their own distinct "bad" smells!
There's the smell test and if it doesn't fail that bad, there is the touch/ouch test feeling which part gets hot 🤣
@@MeriaDuck It's all fun and games until you have a TO92 outline branded into your finger tips. Those little fuckers can get surprisingly hot before they blow up.
Very true! The smell of old devices gives one a very comforting feeling inside.
@@tedvanmatje I'm not sure if it was the flux, the PCBs, or just nostalgia, but I absolutely agree, it's a comforting smell :D
Yes, worked on equipment that was hermetically sealed, and the smell would make it through the seals when it went into well cooked mode, a known failure mode that did occur on the power supply. Last thing to fail then would be the 3 mains fuses, when the transformer finally cooked itself, to the point it hard shorted. Fix was to order new power supplies, at a price that you thought they were made from solid Plutonium, because the same volume of gold would have been a lot cheaper.
My favorite moment was to estimate the focal length by ... Focusing and measuring with calipers. I love this channel
Old optical trick... Optics is my trade :-)
Interesting. Why? I was one of the operators of the Apollo scan converter at Fresnedillas (Spain) during 11, 12 and 13). There are many more components used for converting from slow scan to NTSC. Glad somebody explains. Thanks for bringing memories...
In Sweden we had our own legendary TV commentator, Bengt Feldreich, who guided the audience through the moon landing broadcast. He once told that he had this conversation with an aroused viewer afterwards:
"I saw the Moon landing on TV."
"Yes, wasn''t it amazing?"
"What do you mean? I have a complaint. It was all in black-and-white! I have a color TV!"
I love to recall that anecdote when I as an engineer encounter a certain kind of customer...
Rickrolling the lunar broadcast is legendary.
Imagine if they would have had the technology back in the day (And Rick Astley had already been a thing): Millions of people all over the world watching this historic moment, and just as he takes the first step - in comes Rick Astley. That would have been the ultimate rickroll xD
@@Ranger_Kevin hmm he was born in 66 so no.
@@duderobi Even if, he would have been a toddler at this point. So one would have to take a time machine back and hack the broadcast. And then nobody from the time period would get the joke, probably. But it would be funny nonetheless.
@@Ranger_Kevin you said he was a thing which he wasn't but else you are right. I like rickrolling i have to giggle everytime.
Imagine if the aliens eventually reach our planet and to greet us, play back that 'most-played-music-piece-of-the planet'
Watching this is such an inspiration. I'm retiring within a year; need something old to fix!
Thanks!
Seeing how NASA does a 'breakout box' just makes me happy.
05:49 Noise reminds me of some of the Enterprise bridge background sounds on TOS Star Trek
I wish the moon-hoax people could really understand all the incredibly awesome engineering that went into the whole Apollo porgram. All the millions and millions of small details that super smart people burned countless cups of coffee on to get it working.
Also, there shoud be a TH-cam Nerdfest get-together. You guys, Adam Savage, and so on, all in a big building.
How do you know they can't, what you don't understand, is the public wasn't allowed to see what they actually filmed on the moon. Are you people really super smart? The people employing you and running this charade are even smarter because the technological dividends were huge.
The 'hoax' is a cover for what was seen on the moon, you can hear it yourself listening to the right tapes. Nothing is really hidden if you aren't a 50iq simpleton.
@@N4CR which tapes are those. the Ham radio tapes? the only way I know what they saw is some people have extracted images from the negatives after they airbrushed features from the sky on some originally released photos.
A short tantalum cap - shock news ;) Years ago I used to work on Link TV cameras.......short tants were a pretty much the first port of call. The camera plug in boards had low value inductors in the voltage rails, so usually, the inductors were blown, and then it was just a case of looking for the split tanty. As Mike rightly said, they usually let a bit of molten tantalum out along with the smoke.....
My most memorable failed tant was in a Studer A80 tape machine. When first switched on in the morning it went into fast forward and wouldn't respond to any controls for about 10 minutes...then it would stop and behave perfectly until the next time it was switched off for a few hours. Eventually traced to a tant that re-formed after volts were applied but went short after relaxing for a few hours.
Happy days.....
We have a Vanguard arcade machine at the museum. The speech would only work whenever it felt like it. Sometimes speech, sometimes not and always some weird crackly noise in the background.
I pulled the tantalums coupling the speech audio into the op-amp mixing with the rest of the system and measured them with the Testofon (cue elevator music: This is a displayless tester that converts measurement current into audio frequency, so anything you measure gives off a specific audible signature and after a while of using it you can say, that's a diode; that's a 10k resistor; that's a 470µF capacitor; this capacitor is leaky...) and instead of the cap being short or breaking down at a certain voltage, it was all over the place, I got half a melody out of it, and it wouldn't stop or settle!
And then there was a pinball machine (Game Plan's Pinball Lizard) where the sound would work fine but after about an hour, when you started a game, it went into that drum loop and never got out - it was waiting for the ball shoot signal to go into normal sound effects mode, but that signal had to go through a pulse shaper that used - you guessed it - a tantalum.
That said, Tantalums usually work perfectly fine or they break down at a certain voltage or they are just plain shorted.
"Although we have everything the problem is none of it works." Story of my life.
Love this Apollo series between the S-Band coms and the AGC. Keep up the wonderful work Marc, I learn so many wonderful things from your channel.
Just discovered this wonderful channel and have been watching some of the Apollo-related videos, especially the AGC series.
The US space program, and especially Apollo was a huge inspiration to me and my friends at school during the 1960s and influenced our career choices in electronics and computing. We knew the technology was advanced, but we had no real understanding of it, nor how it would influence the future.
These videos have provided so much insight into those achievements and I’m even more impressed now than I was as a child more than 50 years ago. Thank you, Marc and the whole team!
Your videos have taught me more about fixing electronics than anything I learnt as a diagnostic mechanic tech
I do like the explanations . I was 13 years old when the man went to the moon. Now I learn about the technology from era
Another cracking video from the team. Master Ken needs a great round of applause for the Ric roll at the end
This channel is educational , entertaining and hypnotic ! Can't take my eyes until the end of your videos ! Cheers Marc and your team ! Keep the videos coming please !
Something interesting to note that is related is the recovery of the 1969 landing footage and how that method is now used for modern archival for analogue colour under tapes such as VHS, Video8, High8, Beta formats and so on, by directly digitising the original modulated signals Video/HiFi etc and post demodulating and time base correcting them actual 1:1 tape backup is possible with incredible precision of decoding and manipulating this is all doable by anyone now for sub 100USD of china ADC hardware and tools thanks to VHS-Decode witch spawned from LD-Decode to recover the Domesday disks made by the BBC in the 80's.
The end was 10/10 hilarious, love it and your work, team!
This series is just a gem, it belongs right there with all the (still available) tapes as historic significant things. Thanks for making these! And what a testament to the equipment.
“There is just one small wrinkle, none of it works at the moment” 🤣🤣🤣
The plight of engineers in a nutshell.
Please keep these kind of series going. I love the discovery of the technical wizardry of our past
DC coupling on the TV in on the transmitter > carrier frequency shift when hitting the TV switch.
Still watching he said this after I typed it LOL. Or something like it.
Yep, that's exactly what it was. On one of the test boxes, there is even a knob to adjust the DC bias of the TV, probably for that very reason to avoid a shift.
Oh wow! This channel deserves so many more likes and subs. The most amazing thing ive seen on TH-cam so far. Great work, Marc and team.
How this man records his voice with any sort of legibility over the number of fans in that room is amazing.
Probably a lapel microphone.
Yes, he does have a lot of fans. 😆
Marc, I'm a big fan of your hobby and your work sharing it with us. The extra effort to capture your process, your narration and occasionally explanatory cutaways are really appreciated. I'm happy every time you figure something out, or get something working again. These videos are the next best thing to being there in the room.
I was only searching for this kind of information on the first TV broadcasts from the moon, a few weeks back here on TH-cam! Thanks so much for all the hard work you guys put into making these videos - it's amazing stuff.
Seeing Eric's smiling face on the CRT made my day. We have Vidicon+TV monitor!
Hi Eric how are you doing 😊
Man, that noise in the beginning sounded like it would be an excellent sound effect for Start Trek TOS, or any 60's era style Sci-Fi.
Dammit - I just made a comment about the operating hours counter sounding exactly like the panels in Star Trek TOS (because Marc inserted a caption into the video saying that the noise comes from these, it's at the 6:00 mark) - you beat me to it.
Next step: Marc and the gang test *all* of the equipment at once... by landing on the Moon.
The things you folks do are from beyond this planet!
Thank you so much!
That photo of the scan converter really shows how much today's tech has shrunk. That is an amazing piece of equipment!
Love this. You guys are too much. I bet you have little time for Netflix or.... This is much better entertainment as you know.
23:16 outta hook an fpga to the video output to digitize it so you can capture the raw signals on a computer, which would be the best way possible to determine how well the picture does look
I love the low-tech way the slow-scan to NTSC converter works. And, of course, at the end, Curious Marc Rickrolls from the moon (or a reasonable facsimile thereof.) Well played!
Surveillance cameras still use NTSC (or PAL) today. Although 16:9 images are transmitted, the analog bases are still used. Twisted wires are sufficient for the wiring.
Most of the analog cameras use higher resolutions now and are not compatible with a regular TV. Some can even get 4K video down a piece of RG-59 coax.
Maaan, I understand 10% of the theory here but it is fascinating to see the design decisions and standards created in the 60's. Great job Marc and team.
Amazing results! I do love the sight of all the control panels and their Tellite illuminated switches, the more the better!
Very cool. Just don't erase the original tapes.
Don‘t say that. It hurts 😫
Hi Jim how are you doing 😊
The only tapes erased were a backup copy of the slow scan TV.
Wow, the FM receiver came up without a hitch ! Really enjoyed this video.
Neat, that looks like fun. I always liked the old rf stuff, using actual guides and what not to shape a wave, super neat
It’s very funny. When I was working on digital video capture in the early 90s I was using the same techniques of reduced resolution and dropping the frame rates to cut the bitrates. No idea Apollo has trodden the same track 3 decades earlier. 😂
I feel like regenerating the same kind of video signal as the original one would be a great use of SDR.
If you can find an SDR that operates below 600kHz. Anyways it would be more appropriate to construct a traditional circuit with currently made components and using the fact that computer graphics card from the 1990s can produce component signals at nearly arbitrary frequencies and resolutions by simply setting the clock dividers in SVGA registers. The component video at 320 lines nominal, 10 fps would be fed into the reconstructed camera circuit to output the high efficiency waveform with 500kHz sync bursts then fed to the transmitter.
On the receiving end, 1980s green computer monitors may feature the needed slow phosphors, needing only a traditional circuit to detect the sync pulses and output separate sync and chroma signals for the detuned monitor.
When you give the hardware back to their owners, also hand them a copy of all the videos you made restoring it. Maybe even the raw material and a copy of Ken's blog. This is invaluable information for future generations.
And please use some storage that won't die after two years on the shelf. I heard stone is known to last millennia.
Fascinating! And huge kudos for both fixing and showing this gear, guys! 👏👍
I used to build machines in Sunnyvale, CA that used those tellite switches.
11:35 Original recordings of slow scan footage were not wiped, they were sold to a NASA intern. You can find the NBC News report about the discovery if you search "Original Recorded Footage Of The Moon Landing Found"
@itogi Those are still re-recordings, but they're just a re-recording from an earlier point in time. They're not the original raw video data tapes.
Yes, there are many problems, with original photos and footage being lost, how much of this has to occur before people realize where there's smoke, there's a fire? They had to cover up the real missions.
Who says nerds don't have a wicked sense of humour... Excellent! 👍🏻🇬🇧😀
The noise from the hours counter in the test box sounds suspiciously like the instrument panels in Star Trek TOS.
Never going to give you up! lol Waiting patiently for the next episode
Absolutely amazing to watch this series.
Bedankt
Thanks!
i have read about the slow scan in an old arrl doc, but it is cool to see the parts in action!
Amazing, enjoying every episode.
Wow. I saw the video on the MSOX and I knew you had done it. Good job by you and the team!
Eric has the period correct glasses 🤓
Amazing that the vidicon was still ok! Probably was in a dark room or storage. Specially because there was no lens cap over the optics. I remember from the time I worked with those cameras that the tubes still wore down, even when not used if not protected. P.S. be careful with point source lichts, as led lamps, the burnin is really a problem with these tubes.
Hey, younger TV director who missed the analog era here! I see in concert videos from the late 70s and 80s that the camera operator sometimes gets the stage lighting in frame, creates some vaguely psychedelic trailing effect, but it doesn't seem to "burn in". Did some tubes have a way to mitigate that damage caused by point sources or were otherwise just less susceptible to that kind of damage?
@@Aquatarkus96 Those trails around bright spots are a common effect of a plumbicon camera tube. Some tubes though can be destroyed by bright light sources, like some really sensitive photomultiplier tubes. I don't personally think that TV tubes would suffer from an indirect exposure to light. They generally didn't have a great lifespan as the image became too dull for broadcasting pretty soon.
@@Aquatarkus96 Burn in is a problem if you intentionally or accidentally point it at the sun. Afaik some space tech has actually been destroyed like that. It's worth a google.
Stage lights don't seem to be that much of an issue, though i wouldn't point the camera at a spot light, arc lamp or whatever either.
@@mfbfreak Yup, they pointed the camera at the sun on Apollo 12 and burnt the tube. th-cam.com/video/UtBMAMO11e8/w-d-xo.html
The late Al Bean was familiar with the process…
This is so incredible. Keep doing what you love, its very entertaining!
Pretty amazing. Really loving this series
wow, using Ex NASA Transmission equipment to play Rick Roll, i'm not even mad i'm impressed.
Keep up the great work Marc! loving this series.
Of course we follow the channel you guys are awesome!
I love how you have this much enthusiasm about the whole thing. This makes it so much easier to understand it when you explain the black magic to a common pleb like me^^
Also, if given the opportunity, would you dare to take on a complete command module in unknown state, or would such a project be to big for a small crew like you have?
You bet we’d take it on! You can ship us the command module anytime.
It would be so cool, if you could build an Apollo simulator made entirely out of real parts. That would be a real dream to come true
Very cool to see you guys getting the Apollo microwave gear working. It will make more sense when I watch Apollo13 movie next time.
This makes me wonder where and how and where they converted the slow scan tv image into a 50 fields/s image for pal/secam countries (and even 405-lines for the UK?). Was there a second scan converter that worked with the SSTV signal? or did they work with the NTSC signal? TV standards conversion already seems to be an awefully complicated problem for 1969...doing it live seems even more complicated.
Have been really enjoying this series, even if I can only follow the in-depth electronics at a very high level. Was even saying to myself, 'but you must show the Earth from the Moon' and the (Master) Ken had the same idea. More great work from the CuriousMarc team!
What a shame there are no recordings of the original slow-scan footage - the stills you showed clearly show what was possible compared with the transformed footage that was broadcast. I was too young to remember the moon landings (I’d have been about 3) but presumably a further transformation would’ve been made for broadcast here in Britain.
There was no provision for recording slow scan TV. Only after converting to NTSC. For this we had an Ampex 600, and the tapes were flown in a daily basis to Goddar, so we had nothing as record. However, there was a still camera pointing to the slow scan internal monitor and many pictures were taken. I still have one of them.
I only watch these to see if they can get any nerdier, and I'm NEVER disappointed!🤣
It is a crying shame that the original slow-scans were taped over.
Hey, NASA! The next time some bean-counter suggests something so utterly stupid just to save a few bucks, launch him into orbit.!
Don't feel too bad. According to Mark Stein and apparently Viva Frei the landings never happened. The equipment displayed on this video does not exist. It has been a cover up all along.
@@ihatemybosses I'm way ahead of them. I don't exist either! Take that, moon landing deniers!🤣
That camera reminds me so much of one I built from a kit in the early 80s, it never worked well!
you guys have a lot of fun over there... great stuff just as always
The Curious marc name for this channel is an absolute understatement 😄
hi from mexico!!!
Genios Saludos desde Argentina !!
Thanks for sharing, from Sweden.
Thanks for the video Marc. I enjoyed it.
WOW SO COOL the Size of that equipment is Hard to Fathom when you Think Smart Phone
nothing short of incredible
Fantastic !!!! 👏
Hi how are you doing 😊
9:27 so it wasn't that they didn't have enough bandwidth, but that they needed it for other tasks 🤔 (and couldn't do both with the hardware they could send to orbit)
We are so spoiled nowadays with our Gigabits networks 😅
Did they ever put a second amplifier tube in the later missions or maybe the famous wheel-color system the other cameras used didn't need it?
Because I heard that, besides color, they also improved the quality, so they must have used some more bandwidth...
It’s a complicated story, but they built a sequential color camera with reduced bandwidth characteristics and stomped right over the voice and data, then filtered it back out using a very advanced scheme on the ground. To be explained in the next video on the topic. They also added a high gain deployable antenna on the Moon and used the Goldstone giant dish on the ground. Quite an affair to get color…
ken with the rickroll, what an amazing guy!
Fantastic video, incredible series! Keep it up!
Very nice vidicon camera, I love those old tube ones! Keep up the good work guys :D
Great content and always a pleasure
"If you follow the channel.."
Buddy..I was here within 1 minute of published apparently.
I swear, seeing old video, radio and other gear from the Apollo era was designed by wizards of dark dark analog magic.
Those little skate boarding wizards in the Tektronix manual were there for a reason!
Watched this on the tv, had to login to the pc to thank you for an epic rick roll at the end. Thank you!
Absolutely brilliant!
The last place I expected to get rickrolled... :D
I like your videos
Beautiful.....!!!!! 🤩🤩🤩
Hilarious how TH-cam puts the Wikipedia link for the Apollo program at the top of the video. The real info is right here, still being recovered with every vid
One small step for a Rick, a giant leap for Rick Rolling.
Nice video monitor!
Absolutely amazing, actually the best yt channel ever watched. Love it. ❤️ greetings from 🇮🇹
I really hope you get your hands on some slow scan technology so we can see how it *really* looked.
Hi how are you doing 😊
Bravo Marc, merci de nous faire découvrir tout ces équipements 👏👏👏
Wow... that system must have some tolerance if you can cram NTSC into it like that! Nice work also!
That’s because we use the Command Module FM scheme, explained in the video around 8:55. Turns out you can also do in the LM, and they eventually did, but you need some elaborate filtering and carrier suppression techniques.
@@CuriousMarc Thank you! I think I get it now! I do analog video work so I feel a serious need to understand it for continuing education. Your work here is Monumental!!
14:55 What is that fascinating piece of equipment with an old fashioned rotary telephone dial on it?
Mousepad?