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LabGuy's World:
What's New, LabGuy?
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: The Ampex Old Timer's picnic is being held again this year at Cuesta Park in Mountain View California, Saturday, September 15. If you wish to meet some of the pioneers of magnetic recording and television broadcasting history, this is your chance. These folks are not going to be around forever and each year there are fewer of them. Don't miss this opportunity. (Fred Pfost is asking for a very reasonable five dollar donation for the offset of rental of the park space.) Amateur radio operator, KJ6RNL (That's me), may broadcast the event via fast scan amatuer television on the K6BEN repeater in San Jose. Write and let me know what you may think of such a proposal. You can receive this signal in the south bay area by using an external antenna on your cable ready TV or VCR. (If you use the VCR, please record the transmissions) Set the tuner to CATV mode and go to channel 58. Aim your antenna to the east towards the Mount Lick observatory. At the top of each hour, the repeater broadcasts test slides for about five minutes. Then tune in Saturday afternoon between 2pm and 4pm. Check back here just before then for confirmation of the ATV event. K6BEN official web site. LGW has obtained its first Ampex VR-3000 portable quadruplex video tape recorder. We paid just a little too much for it. But, it was important enough that the sacrifice had to be made. This is the first one to become available in the ten years that I have been searching. It was also convenient that I had the cash on hand at this time.  LGW's very own Ampex VR-3000 VTR The machine is in grim condition at the moment and a rebuild and cleaning is in order. A very good friend on the east coast is making a test tape for me and also providing the missing take up reel. The machine is missing its top cover, so I will take the cover from the accessories kit and use it for the final restoration. Some of the hinge hardware is broken or misisng and will need to be addressed. I may be seeking the mating BC-300 camera in the near future. Talk to me if you can help. INTERN POSSIBILITIES: Anyone who wishes to spend a day with me, working on some of the LGW collection's VTRs, in San Jose California, is certainly welcome to. Contact me at this address:  SIDE BAR: The fellow on the left side of the picture, Charley Anderson passed away recently after a long bout of health problems. Charley was the fellow who designed the first FM signal processing chains in the prototype video tape recorders at Ampex in the early 1950s. This was THE major-ist improvement in the machine to that date. Previously AM recording methods were used. This resulted in sub-optimum images. The fellow on the right is Fred Pfost, the engineer who worked on the development of the first video recording heads and the original inventor of the computer hard drive, for which he has been denied credit since Ampex sold the whole show to IBM. Fred is doing just fine, thank you for asking. We owe these early pioneers of technology our heart felt gratitude. RIP Charley. I am glad and proud that I was able to meet you. (Thank you, Tim!) I enjoyed repairing the Umatic deck and running camera two on "Book Beat", with Charley on camera one, at KNPB in Reno a few years ago. A thrill for me for sure and a great connection to the history I adore so very much. You are truly missed here. SHIBADEN UPDATE: I have begun to operate and test my latest acquistion, the operational Shibaden SV-700 VTR donated to LGW by Charles Bensinger. Of course, in my usual over excited way, I got ahead of myself and committed an act of unforgivable mischief. Not realizing that the tape I was playing was in the wrong format, EIAJ, I assumed something had failed in the VTR and proceeded to tweak the scanner free run speed control inside the deck. Oops!!! Now a realignment is in order. Another great friend and contributor (aren't they all?) to LGW is sending me a test tape that he graciously recorder on his operational Shiba deck. Thank you kindly, Radio Rick! UPDATES UDATES UPDATES! I have reconsidered on shutting down Labguy's Wolrd this year. The site has been on line since about the end of 1997. A recent episode of recurring depression had me feeling like the site was too much trouble. It is certainly a major out of pocket expense. I am slowly recovering from my down time and expect to be back to my old maniacal ways very soon. I contacted Blue Domino, my web hosting company, and renegotiated the fees for the site. Got an almost 300% reduction!!! The fees are now $250 for three years vs $204 for one year on the previous plan. I also renewed the site domain name for the next three years as well. So, the site will be here for your convenience at least that long. (You're welcome!)  One of my favorite and most important books about early video history is Petersen's Guide to Video Tape Recording by Charles Bensinger. Mr. Bensinger has contacted me through this site and we are currently establishing a new friendship. The Guide is the second most influential publication of my career. A couple of electronics industry magazines had introduced me to the concepts of video tape recoring a couple of years before I purchased Mr. Bensinger's book in 1976. But, that book filled in the gaps in my knowlege at that point. Truly a treasure on the subject. Stay tuned as things develop. CONSIDER THIS SITE AS STATIC. NO FURTHER UPDATES WILL BE ADDED. I WILL CONTINUE THE WEB HOSTING FOR ONE MORE YEAR. THEN I WILL DECIDE WHETHER TO CONTINUE WITH THIS EFFORT. I RECOMMEND THAT, IF THERE IS INFO OR PHOTOS HERE THAT YOU LIKE, DOWNLOAD THEM TO YOUR COMPUTER. BE AWARE THAT MOST OF THE MATERIAL IS CREATED AND OWNED BY ME. BUT, MUCH OF IT WAS "HARVESTED" FROM THE WEB AND OTHER SOURCES AND COPYRIGHT MAY OR MAY NOT BE CLEARLY INDICATED. BELOW IS THE ENTRY I WROTE TWO MONTHS AGO AND NEVER POSTED. Long time, no updates. Not since July 11. Last year! Sorry folks. As the internet and I evolve, and learn new tricks, my creative powers have moved, more or less, to YouTube. At least that is where most of my recent creations have ended up. These new videos initially were well related to Labguy's World. But, slowly, the focus has become softer. The YouTube videos cover some basic VTR hisory topics and then meander off to electronic project construction. Conisdering how long LGW has been on the web, it should not be too surprising that I am overdosed on old VTRs. Needed some variations thrown into life. In order to get a respite from electronics, which is my job, hobby and passion, I recently signed up for formal music lessons, learning to play bass guitar. Sweet. Labguy's World has been static for some time now because of the change of my interests. Small table top breadboard projects take up far less space and make far less mess than a single VTR project. So, I am now favoring those. Not shown on this site so far was the CV-2000 restoration. Several YouTube videos were produced as I went along fixing one fault after another until the darn thing worked. A few other small CRT based projects and videos were completed as well. Then I got lucky and obtained an RCA 5527 Iconsocope tube through Ebay. For just over a hundred bucks. That's a bargain for this experimenter's iconoscope tube manufactured in as early as 1948! Four about two months I have been constructing a working camera system around this tube. I have been so abosrbed by the project, I did not produce any video documentation at all. This project was blogged to the OLDVTRS discussion forum on Yahoo and photos were posted of the progress as I went along.
To see years 2007 to 2011 What's New pages, [CLICK HERE]. Scroll to the bottom of each year to find a link to the previous year. [HOME] Created: April 6, 2012, Last updated: September 7, 2012 |
