When CuriousMarc posts a video it is a drop everything moment.

@tekvax01

Жыл бұрын

hear hear!! Thanks Marc!

@ThomasGabrielsen

Жыл бұрын

Agree!

@CuriousMarc

Жыл бұрын

And dropping everything you did, you are FIRST! If you ever find a vintage square wave that you need converted into a vintage sine wave, ship it over, it's on us.

@karlramberg

Жыл бұрын

​@@CuriousMarc _____ _____ _____ ______ ___ | |___ | |___ | |___ | |___ Here is an old school ASCII square wave for you :-D

@TheErador

Жыл бұрын

Aw but then you gotta clean up the mess you made on the floor...

On the short list of people who should be made immortal, I think Ken should be one of them. The amount of knowledge he has in his head should be preserved.....what a legend! 🖖😎

@twilliamson3

Жыл бұрын

Ive yet to see many guys of this generation that have the kind of skills that Marc and Ken have.

What I love about these videos is that you can watch them many many times and every time you understand a little more.

I was on a team that helped manufacturer microwave resonance cavities and other ceramic/glass to metal components used in the Iridium satellite phone system. I touched something that's in space. I was like five subcontracts removed from the final product but I had a lot of fun. That's the coolest thing I ever did. I was a grunt in the process but thrilled to come to work everyday. These guys just do it for fun. NASA gear everywhere.... In his house🤯 I'm a spectator here for the most part. Massive analog electronic fan. Modest knowledge of electronics. I can barely fallow most of it but I love watching these guys do their magic. The big iron stuff tickles my brain. I absolutely envy their level of knowledge.

What an incredible team. Reverse engineering Apollo comms gear is not for the faint hearted but if you put the practicalities aside, it's the passion and dedication that shines through. In a screwed up world here is a safe haven where we can witness human potential at its finest. A mere thank you is not enough.

I'm slowly shaking my head in disbelief...because I have no words for how amazing I think this is. Well done. Just mind boggling..

Each and every episode is a true pleasure. These guys are geniuses.

"Stay tuned" for the next episode at very end. Nice one

An early Sunday morning, ready for breakfast. Oh wait, hold my coffee. CuriousMarc has posted a new video. 25 minutes later... coffee is cold

The bar has been raised and now i will no longer accept any signal processing explanations without dogs.

YES!!! MARC! Immediately clicks LIKE! Thanks for posting part 18! I've been watching you for many years, and love your content! Thank you for all the excellent repair and restoration work you and your team do for history's sake!

Do remember that Nasa used another fork oscillator on spacecraft. Not for electronics, but for time keeping! The Bulova Accutron!

@CuriousMarc

Жыл бұрын

Tuning forks rulez! It had not occurred to me that the Bulova logo (to this day) is a symbol of the miniature tuning fork of their Accutron watch oscillator!

@alanbain1651

Жыл бұрын

Bulova made a short lived, but interesting variant on the Accutron watch in the form of a marine chronometer with three tuning forks mounted in slices at 120 degrees. The top had the indexing pawls and drove the hands via the usual watch arrangement , the other two did not, but the feedback coils were paralleled and fed to the individual transistor amps in each slice to drive the forks and achieve superior resistance to external impulses.

Thanks! A tiny payment to help one of the best KZread channels going

@CuriousMarc

Жыл бұрын

Thank YOU!

You will sometimes find PCB mount tuning fork resonators which were made by Murata and Fuji Electric in Japan. They were made to be used in tone control circuits and they are sometimes found in answering machine remote controls. They have piezoelectric transducers for the output and the drive input. Driving them requires only a simple single-transistor circuit.

Your videos are a master class in thinking and applying knowledge. I wish this sort of collaborative thinking and work could have been part of my electrical engineering curriculum way back when. We NEVER played with analog electronics like you do, it was always very cut and dry in the lab.

Greetings earthlings means that a very interesting video has arrived but this one is one of the best. I love Ken's re-engineering of circuits.

Ken's reverse-engineering skills continue to amaze me. And that self-contained X-Ray machine -- what a great piece of kit that is!

It's possible that those modules were developed in Canada at the Motorola chip fab facility near Toronto (at the time, long gone now). I worked at that facility in the 90's. We made a lot of "black box" passive and active modules for NASA, General Motors and even IBM. We did two-way radio, cellular, microwave and integrated IO modules, to name a few. We had an assembly and prototyping line and development program. We did a lot of limited run and "experimental" components and potting.

You sure do meet some really cool people Marc! Thanks for the Open Circuits book tip. I pre-ordered the hardcover!

Needed some inspiration, thanks for the post. Staring at a breadboard and a pile of components.

I feel like I know a fair amount about electronics, but most of this is so over my head. I love it. You guys are brilliant.

I thought I knew a lot about electronics, watching Marc and his team I realise now I know very little. Great series.

Master Ken a savant of the reverse engineering world 😁 All you guys are incredibly talented and always look forward to watching your videos...

Congrats. You all are truly wizards.

The last time I saw a Faxitron Biopsy X-ray unit was in a mammography dept in a Harley St Clinic...Amazing device..

I so admire the talent and knowledge with electronics that you guys have. Always interesting what you're posting on KZread.

Best channel on KZread!

@markgreco1962

Жыл бұрын

Agreed

Nice to see tunings fork oscillator, bulova accutron was using them at they was also in the Apollo program.

Really exciting to recive yet another amazing broadcast from "Nerdvana" featuring the "Vintage electronics A-Team" :-D Great stuff! I know enough about electronics to know that I know nothing about electronics compared to you guys. :-) Thanks for sharing and big thumbs up!!

No wonder the filter coils were cut out if the specifications were so critical. They were probably quite valuable at the time.

Fantastic! Thanks for taking us along for the journey.

Mam wielki podziw dla konstruktorów tych wszystkich urządzeń NASA z lat 60. Ich złożoność, niezawodność i funkcjonalność zbudowana z elementów dyskretnych, bez dzisiejszych mikroprocesorów, jest zadziwiająca. Inżynieria wsteczna odsłaniająca ich tajemnice jest genialna.

Ken is the man. Everyone on your team is excellent. All star team of players.

24 and a half minutes of fascination and admiration

So incredibly impressive, I only understand maybe 10%, but I definitely can see the amazing work being done here. What a gem of an undertaking and channel!

It is great to see the difference between "the book" and real life beautifully demonstrated. These videos beat the lecture hall any time.

Great work Marc and the whole team. I really enjoy these vlogs.

Ken is a national treasure.

Such a great leap .... I cant wait for the next episode... Beautiful mix of radio waves. electronics and mechanics....

Some of that I actually understood, deep recesses of my mind from day release City & Guilds.

Wow, as always excellent and fascinating engineering! Thanks!!

Tbh this is pure joy to watch!

Love this series!

At 10:48 "Huh, that looked like an Amiga..." rewind... "Yes, it was..."

Quite superb bit of analysis - excellent video. More!

Awesome tech! Again. In your lab. Love your adventures and all the stuff you've got there. I've never seen a tuning fork oscillator :)

Amused that after 20 minutes of video about analog filter circuits, we're asked to "stay tuned" for the next episode ;)

This made my day. Thanks, Marc!

does ken have a youtube? He is a freekin genius

@CuriousMarc

Жыл бұрын

Master Ken has a blog, a KZread and a Twitter (which you can find if you have a Google!). He is most active on Twitter and his blog. Here it goes: Blog: www.righto.com/ KZread: kzread.info/dron/w9VlVopq6Hj6fHmcOivC0g.html Twitter: twitter.com/kenshirriff Ken also occasionally writes for IEEE Spectrum and other publications.

Completely amazing!

Ken is truly amazing....

Fascinating!

For the price of a car you can get a component tester that will plot the complex impedance of any two pole over the range of 50 to 50M Hz. Very useful not only for reverse engineering.

@RemcoStoutjesdijk

Жыл бұрын

Yeah we had an old HP model at university... I would've thought Marc's massive lab would feature one?

impressive work!

Well done!

I just laughed out loud! These guys are completely unbelievable!

Its Apollo Comms time again! 🎊

Marc: The updata link isn't working. Riker: What's updata? Data: Nothing to report, Commander. What is up with you?

In my opinion, you are the best team in the world!

Motorola did amazing work on this!

You did it again team! Great video and congrats with the result. by-the-way: did you watch Adam Savage's video about the new industrial CT scanner? Might be interesting for you guys too for getting 3D CT scans of black box objects that need to be reverse engineered.

There is something magical about coils and oscillating circuits.

Another "inductor" with a very high Q-factor at low frequencies would be a "synthetic inductor." I've seen this done for audio filter circuits. That is, by putting a capacity in the feedback loop of an op-amp, you swap I for V in all the equations, effectively turning it into an inductor. You get very high Q, because real capacitors are much closer to ideal capacitors than real inductors are to ideal inductors. An added advantage is that you can include a variable resistor in the circuit to tune the inductor over a wide range.

Incroyable !

I was recently at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, and on the drive in to the lot, I saw a short little road labeled "S-Band Rd". I meant to take a picture of the sign to send to you, but it slipped my mind in the few short days we had there. But you can confirm it does exist in Google Maps, just off Space Commerce Way. I'd love to know if there is a story behind the name of that road, or if it was just grabbed from a list of jargon.

@CuriousMarc

Жыл бұрын

Hmm... It leads to a pylon / antenna, so I suspect it's not an accident. Maybe where they had the S-Band antenna to aim at the stack when it was on the ground for S-band tests?

Phew. Nice finish

I believe certain Apple devices (iPhone and watches) use a MEMS oscillator instead of a quartz. And the resonator oscillates with e.g., helium exposure in another frequency and prevents the operation.

Love it. Electronic Archeology

I have a Bulova space view watch. I think it uses the same tuning fork principle to maintain correct time.

@CuriousMarc

Жыл бұрын

Lucky you! It does!

tsss! you guys are rocking!

Too bad the old telco 88 mH toroids aren't available any more. Those were the best for audio filtering circuits!

@shamrock1961

Жыл бұрын

Couldn't they be made special from scratch,?

Had an interesting side chat with someone in Quincy IL about ghosts of Quincy's tech past.

@bobweiss8682

Жыл бұрын

Gates Radio?

@MarionMakarewicz

Жыл бұрын

What? I lived in Hannibal for years across the river and spent a lot of time in Quincy. Had no idea there was such tech past to Quincy. I do remember there was a television manufacturer, but it was gone by the time I grew up and would have noticed something like this. Gone is gone. Wow. It was a big employer back in the day. Well, nice to at least have some remote connection to the geniuses in this video.

@72polara

Жыл бұрын

Glenayre and Quintron?

NASA engineer: We need a really stable 4kHz oscillator. Done… stick a fork in it!

That's the journey :o I love it ;)

Love it! Way to go guys... Ken is indeed the man. Don't let any helium near your MEMS devices or they'll go nuts... you can brick your iPhone with helium (or hydrogen I assume).

..gracias

Great videos! You guys are ok and smart. Question: if I sent you an Eico 667 tube tester kit(not heathkit, never built), could you build it and do a video on it? You don’t have to send it back, and as incentive, I will send you an fz-m1 toughbook to also do a video or evaluation if you want, or just keep it as a doorstop or whatever you want to use it for.

Greetings Earthlings!!

Thanks!

@CuriousMarc

Жыл бұрын

Well thank YOU!

So several days later or six months? ;-) Beautiful video as always!

It's a huge shame that Excess Solutions is going out of business. They have so much unique stuff.

@CuriousMarc

Жыл бұрын

It’s very sad and annoying indeed.

Amazing work! BTW - What are those perf boards? They look really sharp.

A "soyuz module" into an apollo device, interesting mashup

I am pretty sure exactly what happened here was they needed some high quality coils and possibly the fork oscillator for something else at NASA and someone found the things they needed in the old Apollo test gear and just 'borrowed' them permenantly

I bow to the masters

would like to access thos doddelidoothing. want to look into the book with x-ray pics of components.. how to find? cheers Jens

Fwiw "Pico electronics" makes a number of High Q inductors.

Mot spent so much R&D developing the cordwood / module system it makes me wonder what other one off devices were made with this system.

If this is fully working now, what will the next episode be about?

Maybe they needed the parts for something else - maybe Shuttle -, and the quickest way was to cut them out of old equipment.

That dog is straight up trying to bite that girl

You might just use an 32.768kHz tuning fork crystal and divide it by 8 to get the 4kHz Frequency ? So You would have an tuning fork oscillator almost like the original.

Watching people reverse engineer space electronics with custom designed x-ray software while failing to get cheerios from the bowl to my mouth. How did my life get here?

So carefully removing the plastik packaging for reverse engineering was not an option?

Once CM builds a time machine out of Apollo comms gear I going back to the sixties.

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

I believe that watch crystals at 32.768kHz are a tuning fork construction.

a 1 kHz-wide PSK signal? Yeesh…gotta be quick on your feet with the commands. Out of curiosity, is there an envelope on the PSK modulation? I can’t really tell, but my ears keep saying it’s the raw phase change with no envelope.

Liberating!!

Master Ken isn't aware of the word "secret."