Motorola Unified S-Band RF Track Test Panel

4 responses to “Motorola Unified S-Band RF Track Test Panel”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Mar 13, 2022 at 10:34 pm

   Side sticker:

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2. 

   beans_again?

   Oct 2, 2022 at 11:30 pm

   You say this ran standalone. Guess: you might need that adjustment if you have another space-to-earth link that needs to be synchronized during a switch to this one. The timing could account for delay over this hop versus delay from a different link onboard a nearby spacecraft. Maybe they didn’t want a burp in the analog telemetry and this was how they prevented it? That’s the only reason I could see for the 0-3ms delay.

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3. 

   jurvetson

   Oct 4, 2022 at 7:54 pm

   [https://www.flickr.com/photos/195176867@N05] interesting idea. In the Apollo context, would this be a shift between LM and CSM?

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4. 

   beans_again?

   Oct 5, 2022 at 2:47 am

   I think LM=Lunar Module and CSM=Command/Service Module.

   That would be my guess, yes. If this guess is accurate, they must’ve sent some kind of synch or timing pulse between LM and CSM in order to measure the correct timing. You would measure then set this 0-3ms knob to match. If LM and CSM were on different space-to-earth radio frequencies, the analog signals from both could then be bussed because the timing exactly matched.

   That timing might go over VHF? I think one diagram you posted showed a VHF link from LM to CSM. In the analog world, that data could have been sent as a 10,000 Hz tone pulse, (for a made-up example,) which would be inaudible because it is out of the analog voice (0-4,000 Hz) pass band. Similar tricks were done with 1960s analog telephone and push-to-talk two-way radio networks.

   I hope this makes sense.

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