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Hmmm... pirate radio station? But why?
Posted 4 days ago.
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Hi, I'm an admin for a group called Skulls, and we'd love to have this added to the
group!
Posted 4 days ago.
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Somebody finally decided to get rid of the
old DEC PDP8 that was down in the basement,
and which they used to use for inventory
control - so it was brought upstairs where
staff could bid on it and the winner gets to
take it home.
The tape unit (back left) could mount a 2400
foot reel of tape, 600 bits-per-inch with 1
1/2 inch gaps between data blocks. Because no
block could be larger than a portion of
central memory, in practical terms say 4K
bytes, figure about 500 blocks would fit on a
reel, or 2 megabytes...
Posted 4 days ago.
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Arrr!
Posted 4 days ago.
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a Stasi-style listening station, monitoring
the number of people - using Skype or regular
telephony - who communicate using only the
present tense, drop their 'g's and 'v's, and
employ double adjectives.
this is, in all likelihood, operated by the
lily-livered son of a biscuit eater.
Posted 4 days ago.
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jitze: hmmm... you are getting close... that
tape drive is very special, as are the tapes;
both are one of a kind these days.... Now
why would they have gone to all the expense
of a 256K memory array, 40 years ago...
biotron: the tapes do come from three
different international listening stations...
Posted 3 days ago.
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Ok, I give...haven't a clue why this older
equipment is there, but very interesting!
Maybe an actual reason to visit a McDonalds,
out of curiosity...
.
Posted 3 days ago.
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yikes! is Gene Hackman blowing a sax anywhere on the premises? *
i'm baffled.
Posted 3 days ago.
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Ooooh - you say "the tapes do come from
three different international listening
stations... "
The "listening stations" were for
seismic telemetry, we're talking oil
exploration, and the 256K memory array was to
allow for very fast "Fast Fourier
Transforms" to process the wave forms.
Posted 3 days ago.
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Ahh. Gear from a Very Long Baseline
Interferometry experiment?
Posted 3 days ago.
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What amazing work these guys are doing. I am
not saying a word more until “the cat is out
of the bag,” then 'll post some sweet
supporting images =) Steve - Thanks for
letting me tag along.
Posted 3 days ago.
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Tapes from the SOSUS? Searching for a sunken
ship/sub? P^2's and jitze's guesses both
sound good.
Posted 3 days ago.
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Heh... Jitze knows more than it seems... Just
not with the posts he is making here... Yarr!
Posted 3 days ago.
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My guess is that the tapes are telemetry data
from a space mission or missions from the
past.
Posted 3 days ago.
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I just knew your namesake was not wasted...
Now here's a clue: there are 48,000 lbs of
tape in this McDonalds...
Posted 3 days ago.
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Could it possibly be that it is no longer an
active McDonalds and it was a convenient
place to convert 48,000 pounds of mission
tapes to a more modern format for posterity
purposes? Sort of a pirate takeover?
Posted 3 days ago.
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Analog recording tape... pirate flag in the
window... And the 19th was "Talk Like A
Pirate Day." The connection seems
obvious to me.
Posted 3 days ago.
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Mariner and/or Voyager (or V'ger ;) imagery
data? Data recorded by NASA's Deep Space
Network (DSN) at Goldstone, Canberra and
Madrid?
Posted 3 days ago.
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Ahoy ahoy! Me late for the partey?
Avast! me thinking... Jim Rees above me has
connected Talk like a pirate day with
recording tape... mmm, suspicios indeed...
that could be a clue, but I think it's just
casual. (the mission was going on there apart
form the fact yesterday was TLPD) ...me
guess.
From all the guessers, I am close to guess
something like pirate roketeer dropped in his
first post...
At first glance/imagination... my guess is
that they are digitalizing/masterizing old
tape with those first recordings done in the
60's (60's?) to "hear"space from
the first time to try to find anything
abnormal that could be endorsed to ET
activity and/or the first hearings of the
universe, when the scientists discovered
(accidentally by catching strange radsio
emissions it was?) that the universe actually
made "noises", it was not silent.
Possibly these tapes are of the past what
today is the SETI project, that you can offer
your computer to become a space ear when it's
idle....
www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/06/24/space_n
oise/print.html
something related to this?
Aliens are no far from space pirates anyway,
aren't they? And these people are trying to
listen to aliens "talk" in those
tapes.... is that a very alegoric way,
joining ideas, to celebrating Talk Like a
(space) Pirate Day!
(Jim?)
Yarrr!
Posted 3 days ago.
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Bingo Rocketeer for spotting mission tapes and jerryfi_99 for guessing that imagery data would take
this much space.
The Pirate flag is purely motivational,
methinks, for a skunkworks improvising what
was thought to be impossible.
Forty years ago, unmanned lunar orbiters
circled the moon taking extremely high-res
photos of the surface to plan landing spots
for Apollo 11 onward... In this McDonalds,
the only copy of that data is about to be
resurrected. Erik and I dropped in for a
visit after the LUNAR rocket launch at NASA
Ames.
And gosh, Alieness may be right too when
they look at those images carefully for
three-toe footprints...
They have never been seen by the public
because at the time, they were classified
because they would reveal the extreme
precision of our spy satellites. Instead, all
we have ever seen are the grainy photo of a
photo images that were released to the
public.
The spacecraft did not ship this film back
to Earth. Instead, they developed the film
on the Lunar Orbiter and then raster scanned
the negatives with a 5 micron spot (200
lines/millimeter resolution) and beamed the
data back to Earth using
yet-to-be-patented-by-others lossless analog
compression. Three ground stations on Earth
(one was in Madrid) recorded the
transmissions on these magnetic tapes.
Recovering the data has proven to be very
difficult, requiring technological
archeology. The only working version of the
Ampex tape player ($300K when new) was
discovered in a chicken coop and restored
with the help of the original designer.
There is only one person on Earth who still
refurbishes these tape heads, and he is
retiring this year. The skills to read this
data archive are on the cusp of disappearing
forever.
Some of the applications of this project,
beyond accessing the best images of the moon
ever taken, are to look for new landing sites
for the new Google Lunar X-Prize landers, and to compare the new craters on the moon
from 40 years ago, a measure of
micrometeorite flux and risk to future lunar
operations.
And yes, the conspiracy continues, with
McDonalds' long and sordid history with the
Apollo program...
 P-) 
Posted 3 days ago.
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I would never have guessed. Most intriguing.
Posted 3 days ago.
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incredible. i had a look at all sorts of
Ampex reel-to-reels, but couldn't find that
model - what is it called?
i was desperately trying to place the
Labview book, the Greenlee case, the Ampex
unit - and wondering if the acetone was for
either splicing humourous edits of
declassified NSA intercepts together a la [
***NB profanity alert - NSFW*** ] Cassetteboy or Evolution Control Committee - or for dropping onto acoustic sensors in
resonance frequency tracking with potential
use for detecting narcotics or tumours, as in
this paper...
i keep thinking of Jim Finn's hilarious movie Interkosmos...
Posted 3 days ago.
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I'm astounded there is no regular program to
preserve this kind of data given the cost of
acquiring it. I was reading somewhere that
nearly all the old Russian imagery has been
lost. I didn't realize the US imagery was in
danger too.
Posted 2 days ago.
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Apollo's orphans...
biotron: this might help; I just uploaded a video tour of the tape player and environs. (There is a
bit of background noise as the tape drive was
operating.) The speaker is the
"technical archaeologist" who lives
in the McDonalds it seems. The other voices
midway are from NASA spacecraft designers.
Posted 2 days ago.
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superb - thanks for the video, so
interesting! 12.5 nanoseconds!
it's an Ampex FR-900 - after a good deal of
trawling, i found this post - from 18 days ago :)
well - the people behind this site now have an answer...
Posted 30 hours ago.
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