Amazing. Big antenna, klystron tube, Apollo hardware and a PDP-8 all in the same video. Good work Marc.

@Rob2

2 жыл бұрын

And pineapple as well!

@RA-II

2 жыл бұрын

We great fun. Well done

Bouncing random morse off the moon with a big dish is the ultimate evolution of shouting into a cave to hear your echo. Amazing.

As a Stanford student in the 1980s, I attended a ceremony at the Dish where we officially retired the venerable PDP-8 and replaced it with a "modern" IBM PC. We respected the history of the PDP-8 but it was just getting too hard to maintain. I also remember finding that old rack-mount gear with the Apollo stickers on it and wondering how it had been used. Thanks for finally answering my question!

@frankbrockler

2 жыл бұрын

If you have any more information about the Apollo experiments at Stanford, please share. Or if you're still in touch with former classmates who you think might know more about the experiments, please let them know about Marc's work on the Apollo comms. It would be great if Marc could do a followup video on the topic. Maybe he'd resurrect the PDP-8!

@engmcgill

2 жыл бұрын

​@@frankbrockler I wish I knew more about the Apollo experiments at Stanford but it was already ancient history (20 years previous) by the time I found that equipment. I don't know what became of the PDP-8 but I remember we cracked open a bottle of champagne for the ceremony, not so much to welcome the IBM PC, but to pay our respects to the beautiful PDP-8. My favorite story about the Dish is when Owen Garriott, a Stanford graduate, flew on the Space Shuttle for STS-9 in 1983, he operated one of the first amateur radio stations from space. The Stanford Amateur Radio Club, W6YX really wanted to contact him but there were two problems: you were only allowed to use 5 W of transmitter power, and every radio amateur in the western US was trying to contact him so it was very difficult to get his attention. Then the club realized, "Hey, we have an advantage nobody else has-we have a 150 ft dish!" They connected a handheld 2-meter transceiver to the Dish's feed, tracked the shuttle as it passed, and used all that antenna gain to basically AGC everyone else into oblivion. They got their QSO and a good story to tell as well.

@frankbrockler

2 жыл бұрын

@@engmcgill Beautiful!

@b43xoit

2 жыл бұрын

I'll bet a PDP-8 emulator could be whipped up that would be cheap to maintain.

@frankbrockler

2 жыл бұрын

@@b43xoit I'll bet Marc has a PDP-8 emulator running on an HP 9825.

I have been following this series as I watched everything Apollo as a kid. I designed the hardware and wrote the software for the propulsion system on the Marco cubesats. I was at JPL when the Insight lander was landing and both the Marco cubesats successfully completed their mission. I had no idea this dish was involved in the mission. I will pass this video along to the other team members on the propulsion system. It was a cold gas system with eight thrusters. Thank you.

@obsoleteprofessor2034

2 жыл бұрын

HI! You might remember me. I worked for NASA, driving the roach coach. I'm behind that incident when someone pressed the wrong button when I drove up and yelled "LUNCH" and he thought I said "LAUNCH".

My coffee went cold watching this! eyes glued to the screen the entire trip, great video and awesome to see! thanks to the guys for letting you have a little tour of the old and historic equipment. (the new stuff is boring anyway)

When I was coming to the end of highschool a friend of a friend gave me a tour behind the scenes at Jodrel Bank observatory. This was before the upgrades to the Lovell telescope (Mark 1A as it was then) in the 90s, so there was lots of 1950’s era kit still in use (including the control panel which I believe is still there and looks very James Bond). That also runs on bearings taken from old battleship gun mounts. I went straight home and quizzed my maths and physics teachers about interferometry and Fourier transforms because there were not many other ways for a school boy to find out about these things in a small English town in the days before the internet. Still working in science and engineering today.

There's so much of this random old stuff in the bay area. It makes me sad that I never visited any of it when I lived there. That's how life goes I guess. "Sure, I can visit the Computer History Museum any time, it's like half a mile away." Years passed, I moved away, and I never did visit.

16:54 So the high-tech dish that supports Mars landings and micro-satellites is controlled by a Pentium II CPU running Windows 98 running a DOS program written in Fortran. This is why I still get calls from recruiters looking for COBOL programmers.

@andreasu.3546

2 жыл бұрын

Because they don't know the difference between Fortran and Cobol?

@WilliamDye-willdye

2 жыл бұрын

@@andreasu.3546 I just meant old programs in general, but come to think of it, you're probably right in some cases. I've had recruiters mix up buzzwords on several occasions.

@thesteelrodent1796

2 жыл бұрын

it's quite common for anything related to space tech to use very old hardware and software to function, just because it works and is reliable. Most military stuff is regularly updated for security reasons, but banks and the financial business in general still has a ton of very old software written in languages only a minority remember ever existed, and quite often that software has multiple layers of patch jobs in order to function on slightly newer hardware and communicate with modern systems. It's typically very complicated and completely unnecessary to change these old systems to something modern; literally boils down to the old "don't fix what isn't broken"

@lwilton

2 жыл бұрын

About 70% of the backend processing done at every major bank in the world is done in COBOL. Still. I recall talking to a customer in about 1976 that said they had over 10 million lines of COBOL code in production. That was ONE bank.

@BAD_CONSUMER

2 жыл бұрын

You have no idea how many critical manufacturing facilities have tools running 25+ year old software. Its one of the reasons ransomware spread like wildfire.

The "big dish" was used on Apollo 14,15, and 16 for surface roughness studies. It received some frequencies around 400 MHz. It was used in conjunction with the Goldstone receiver on S-band (it used the video transmitter in the CSM). I was with the compute facility that processed the data. Lots of data! It may have been used for other Apollo tasks, I don't know. In addition, it was used at around 50MHz to contact the Voyager Satellites after they discovered a flaw in the receiver. They ended up not needing to use it for Voyager after they modified the earth transmitters.

Being able to blast some morse at the moon and then hearing it back, delay and all, such a trivial yet entertaining idea!

@ruawhitepaw

2 жыл бұрын

Ham radio operators also do this with the right equipment.

@hoofie2002

2 жыл бұрын

Called moonbounce by amateurs

@Digital-Dan

2 жыл бұрын

I expected to see Howard, Sheldon, and Leonard there somewhere.

@petersimpson6076

2 жыл бұрын

@@ruawhitepaw It's the "right equipment" part that's hard to get access to :-) Being a ham, I would have done the same thing, if I were given access to that dish!

I just can’t believe how you can keep on coming up with jaw dropping content. And this was a “viewer contribution”. You got the world’s crème de la crème of an audience. Thanks Steve for the initiative.

Outstanding! 1960 would be about the time when my mother was working on her doctorate at Stanford. I doubt she knew anything about the dish though. Mom never finished that degree because I was born shortly after that. 20 years ago we went back so I could learn a bit more about where I came from, and she showed me a lot of the Stanford campus. By the time we got to the tower, I was tired, and sent Mom up the tower alone. Had I known that I could have seen the antenna, I would have gone, but then I would have wanted to go see the antenna close up. Once I got to come along on a private tour of Fermilab, and took note that the many power amplifiers used there were almost identical to those that we used in TV broadcasting. IIRC we used klystron tubes for UHF transmitters, studio to transmitter links and in ENG trucks back then.

The Sepia tone definitely gave it a very retro feel!!! Great content as always! 😊👍

Excellent video, that was a great invite Marc. Thank you Steve for taking our intrepid Apollo gang for a tour around this rolling museum!

This has got to be the best nerd channel on KZread, bar none. 73 Steve M0KOV

This was absolutely incredible. Huge thanks to everyone at SRI for showing us around!

The brother to this dish is located at Millstone Hill Radar in Westford MA. I worked during the summers while in college on the antenna and site maintenance crew. I remember climbing up to the elevation bearings with a grease gun to pump 3 tubes worth of lube into each bearing. Best job I ever had - Phil Goode and Jimmy Hunt were in charge and it was a wonderful way to spend the summer.

@petersimpson6076

2 жыл бұрын

You used to be able to see it from 495 before the trees grew up...always wondered about it.

@randallhulette4973

2 жыл бұрын

@@petersimpson6076 My next door neighbor was a electronics tech there at the site. He came up to me the night I graduated high school back in 1981 and asked me if I had a summer job yet. Pre 9/11 you could drive all the way up to the Haystack Observatory. I visited about 12 years ago and they have a gate installed. Ended up walking up to see it again. It's pretty damn big up close. I also worked on the 84 ft deep space tracking antenna. They fed that with 2 megawatts of L-Band through 2 huge klystrons. The transmitter bay was fantastic to see. Every summer was great there.

In the early 1980's I had a short stint at the Hartebeeshoek Earth Satellite Station telephony division working on the analogue wideband data systems before the up and downlinks. Next door is SANSA (aka Hartrao aka DSS-51) DSS-51 was one of the roughly 20 satellite stations used for the MSFN. The deep space network/MSFN was an integral part and success of the early Apollo Programme.

... And a Grand Day Out was had by all - what a great adventure! Most enjoyable.

In 1993 a brand new satellite I worked on seemed to be fading with every orbit. Some people immediately said we should try to enlist that antenna into communicating with it until we could figure out what was going on - cooler heads suggested we try using ephemeris from the booster instead of what NORAD said was the satellite...

Wow, that is so cool! I'm glad you got a chance to tour the dish and bring your visit to us.

Dos with Fortran and Windows98 got me.

@frogz

2 жыл бұрын

windows me sucked even if it had real dos still, it was just locked off from the end user

@johnbevelagua

2 жыл бұрын

@@frogz windows Me was a joke

@TheErilaz

2 жыл бұрын

The urge to install Linux was strong!

@petersimpson6076

2 жыл бұрын

"if it works, don't fix it!"

That's a lot of vintage goodness in one episode. Still used vintage goodness, with delicious bodges everywhere to keep it going, like the mostly-matching-size led displays in place of nixies.

Love the beefy RF connections! Great stuff.

@frogz

2 жыл бұрын

when your rf voodoo is so black magic you have to use plumbing fittings as coax....

@glynnetolar4423

2 жыл бұрын

@@frogz RF plumbing done all the time at your local TV and radio stations. They also fill those with dried air or nitrogen to keep them from arcing. Typical high power radio station may push 8KV @ 3A so arcing is a thing.

@CuriousMarc

2 жыл бұрын

Me too!

@frogz

2 жыл бұрын

I want to hear the Corona discharge of these radio and TV you speak of to see if you can hear the content in open air

@russellhltn1396

2 жыл бұрын

@@frogz I've been to an Omega station when it was operating. You could hear the tones in the air outside of the transmitter building. (Transmitting frequency of 10-14KHz. In the range of human hearing.)

Bouncing CW off the moon is the coolest thing I've seen this month by far.

This Is a HISTORY channel EVENT; this should be shown on Public TV. great stuff guys...

Magnifique 👍 j'aimerais tellement voir ça de près. Et puis y'a le côté vielle électronique à lampes et c'est un autre charme. Magnifique 👍👍👍👍

Thank you for making all this historic gems available for us to see. I love it!

I’ve been going past that antenna for decades, since I was a kid in the ‘70s. I had that Apollo 16 mission handbook, which my parents ordered for me from the Government Printing Office. I was (still am) a huge Apollo fan, and I loved that my local antenna was used for Apollo, putting a bit of the program in my backyard. Very interesting to hear about its other uses, and so cool that you got the opportunity to see it up close. As I was watching, I was thinking how amazing it would be to hook a ham radio up to it. And there you did it!

HOW COOL!! A PDP8! We had one at school and I stood in front of it and tried to program it by switching the switches … 😂 Thanks for those great insights, Marc!! ❤️

Parks is a fun one to visit. Get there around sunset on the right days and you can watch them set up and adjust the dish. One day we'll visit and do a tour, but we visited it when we went past on a road trip.

Preparing to get my ham license. This video provided some cool motivation!

It’s great that you are documenting the Apollo mission details like this. These details will be lost forever otherwise. THR RF engineers were incredible! The whole site reminded me of a visit to a Nike missile defense site as Boy Scout at the height of the Cold War.

Thank you so much for this fantastic demonstration. I liked the moon bouncing CW test. Many greetings ✨️ Matthias 👋 DL1NDG

The US space program (from the early days post WW2 and particularly Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo) demonstrates how the impossible becomes possible with a national focus to acheive well defined goal (land a man on the moon and return him to earth). Tens of thousands of people all did their individual jobs to make the impossible possible. Landing a man on the moon in such a short period of time is the most incredible of all endevors of history.

I have seen the dish many times on my way to the ham swap at Foothill College. Many thanks to all those involved to allowing all of us on the internet visit the dish.

Wowza!!! Thanks Steve Muther and SRI - For this close and personal look at this monster piece of equipment the public never get to see!

I grew up on these hills! Thank you Marc for showing us what goes on in this magnificent structure. I love all your videos! - But this one in particular is a symbol of my 18 living and growing years in Palo Alto

That transmitter reminded me of a student job I did when I was in college and studied electrical engineering. We had to move stuff from the radiology department of our local hospital because the building was demolished. They had a big ass 1950s siemens klystron amplifier there which fed some old school radiation therapy doo-hicky. I really felt bad scrapping the thing. But as a college student, I had absolute no storage space. I snatched/saved some nice high voltage vacuum capacitors and two pressure cooker sized power tubes, though. Still have them laying on my display shelf, gathering dust since 30 years...

This era of equipment is really something magical

Wow - just look how graceful that ballet is @9:00 - wonderful to watch.

Amazing! Big thanks to Steve and SRI for enabling you to share with us this experience - truely awesome! High five from Poland :)

Wow, just wow! Thank you Marc and Steve!

Blew my mind! Thanks a lot for showing us all of this, and with explanations.

Wonderful video Marc. I enjoyed hearing about all the history and the tour. But the moment you had the Ham rig connected I was amazed. I certainly am aware of Moon bounce communications, but I never have actually heard it done that clearly before. Simple Magnificent!

I Was there from 1989-1997or 8 and saw a lot of changes, yes it was PDP8. Memories.

Wow - thanks for this. I've seen that dish while driving past on the freeway and wondered what its capabilities were. Now I know!

Your visit to this site is an important historical event. I really hope you guys took the time to create a log entry in the log books. Seriously...

Just now seeing this video. I love this channel more every day. When you opened that cabinet you could probably hear my ooohs and ahhhs all the way from Texas. Your mission is a beautiful one.

I really appreciate the subtitles, I wouldn't be able to watch the segments with wind noise otherwise. Been slowly catching up on this series and it's been great!

Fascinating! I used to love to hike this trail when I lived nearby. Wonderful to hear more about the history and operations, bravo!

I started in NASCOM but now, unfortunately, all of Goddard's big tracking dishes are gone, but we still have 2 of the original Gemini/Apollo tape recording units, i've got a 5 foot model of the USNS Vanguard and the emergency presidential red phone from that era. Most has been lost (because we absolutely suck at preserving our own history) but I try to save anything the'll let me...

Thanks for the wonderful tour. Pure amazing.

Excellent. Another superior show. All the stuff I watched in the 60s comes to life and it still works. That dish certainly beats my dipole, but somehow I do not think herself would thrilled with something that massive in the back.

Wow glad to see that Steve is still alive and driving the same truck. I came to Thailand in search of large dish antennas over a year ago, but have found none.

This channel gets better and better! Thank-you!

I walk the dish with my girlfriend all the time and it is great to see this amazing piece of working history so close!

That's fantastic! Thank you Steve and SRI!

very interesting - thank you so much. that's why i am watching KZread. You never see such content on TV... Greetings from Vienna!

Brilliant video, thank you so much for making and for SRI to allow you in.

Thankyou for that video Marc, that was absolutely fascinating!

Wow. This is a fantastic video! Thank you so much for posting this - just amazing.

So cool to see you guys out on a field trip, this was an exceptional episode!

Marc, what an absolute gem of an episode! Brilliant!

When I used to work in the then-young Silicon Valley, I passed by that dish every day on the 280. Wow. Thank you for the video tour! Grazie mille!

Thanks to Steve for sharing this with us all. Fascinating

What a fascinating video - and Steve is wonderfully generous with his knowledge. Brilliant, thanks.

You are blessed that you got that magical visit, I am blessed that you shared it, thank you

Use to work @ SRI and operate the Dish! look different back then.

What an amazing opportunity. Thanks for the video.

That was a great tour! There is something magic about these big dishes. I remember crawling through the maintenance way of a 25 m radio telescope some years ago, looking at everything possible there was, and just loved it.

That's super awesome Marc Thanks for sharing!

This is AMAZING so glad there are people associated with these sites who watch your channel and want to support historical documentation of these facilities! Just awesome.

Forget the lottery Marc you are so lucky to visit this site excellent video.

Probably the most engaging video I have ever seen.

Ok this is one of the best video series i have seen in my entire life. Thanks Marc and all the team, keep it up with this amazing work

Thank you for taking us there, Marc. And, to hear the signal reflected off the moon. Great stuff! 73

What a gift! Awesome video!!

Amazing :) I was once lucky enough to have a behind the scenes tour of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope as featured in a number of Dr Who episodes. They showed us the liquid nitrogen cooling for the low noise amplifiers.

Awesome tour! I have driven by that antenna so many times on 280, and have always wanted to see it up close!

Thank you! I always wanted to know more about this facility since the dish is so alluringly visible from the road.

S-Band! Yes indeed. Love following your progress. just watching that 150 foot dish rotate and gymbal made my day.

I once lived in Palo Alto and hiked around the Stanford Hills on occasion. Am also a ham radio op and was aware of the EME work at the Big Dish. Thank you for this awesome video tour!

Top quality youtube channel !! Very impressive !

Absolutely the best channel on KZread, Vintage electronics and computers with historical context around Apollo doesn’t get any better. The inspiration for building my own AGC - keep it up Marc absolutely brilliant. 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

Most excellent. I enjoyed this very much!

Fascinating! Thank you very much!

So... next episode, we attach your newly restored Apollo era transmitter, the time machine and the receiver, and have a chat with Apollo 16. Looking forward (or should that be backwards) to it. ;~)

Thanks for showing us this. This was fascinating!

Fantastic tour. Love the old klystron TX tour and the old pic of the PDP-8 --- so many modules, so little compute power.

Having grown up in Menlo Park and done many a walk at "The Dish" this was absolutely fascinating! So fun to hear some interesting history around such an iconic spot.

Thank you for this trip that reminded me of my time on a contemporary built U.S. Navy Destroyer class ship with the the latest and greatest communications and radar along with the one of the first three digital computer equipped air traffic control systems (NTDS). I worked on those Seymour Cray developed solid state UNIVACs and with technicians who knew our klystron powered radar. I myself was trained on vacuum tube radio transmitters and recievers but aboard that ship were many prototypes using transistors, greatly improving my knowledge. Not an single IC though. Years later in my Hughes Aircraft career, I did get introduced to PDP-8 equipment but not fully. This video may help with a variant I know of located where I spend part of my retirement as a docent at the Mt. Wilson Observatory. Their solar telescope scanning computer, now kaput, is of that vintage, and has yet to be replaced with a more up to date processor. Just maybe their Pentium solution might work.

Great video. I live 12 miles from Joderal bank dish,here in the UK. A great place to visit, they are currently building a new visitor centre.

I love the dirt problem solving on the rail ... 😅😍

Great video! I worked at a NASA STADAN tracking station at Winkfield UK from 1964 to 1969.

I have absolutely no idea what is going on there, but it is just fascinating! 👍👍👍

Fun fact: The 1965 moon bounce experiment proved that the Moon _wasn't_ made of Gruyère and thus ended Switzerland's dominance in the Moon-cheese market.

Thanks to SRI for the tour, and thank you Mark for the great video. Kc8ujp '73

that is so cool that he invited you there thank you to both

What a massive interesting episode! I loved everything of it (including seppia😬). Very clear explanations. This episode remembered myself as kid that I started to love electronics because of radar display (strictly tube based). Thank you for allowing us to participate to your private visit.

@mhyotyni

2 жыл бұрын

Sepia coloring, ragtime music and old machinery 👍 Didn't miss grainy film or keystone cops, though!