T͢V͢ ͢f͢r͢o͢m͢ ͢t͢h͢e͢ ͢M͢o͢o͢n͢ 📡 ………………………….🚀… 🌖
They did it. It took 21 episodes to revive my Apollo S-Band transponder and 20W tube amp and reverse engineer and revive the various test fixtures, but they did it. They transmitted B&W (color to come) TV with my vintage equipment.
In this episode, they added my FM Receiver to the Transponder mount and various other elements of ground equipment. It worked like a champ, with everything, even the light bulbs, still functioning 50+ years later.
To save power and bandwidth, the Apollo camera made some unusual design choices. The single S-Band radio link carries data, voice, and ranging information along with the TV signal. It’s 320 lines * 10 fps with a very unusual slow scan and sync signal (short bursts of 500kHz). While good for the unified transponder, the video could not be broadcast or even shared with Houston TV monitors; it required a huge scan converter machine. This was a crude analog converter — they displayed the slow scan video on a screen and filmed the screen with a NTSC TV camera! This led to serious image degradation for everything we saw on TV at the time.
Enjoy! https://youtu.be/YBpleXMTuz8
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