Curious Marc Fixing a US$33,000 HP 3GHz Signal Generator he Bought for US$150

This thing is amazing. It has a tiny spherical Yttrium iron garnet crystal resonator in a box to generate microwave frequencies:

 

It's part of the Apollo communications system. See Apollo S-Band Communications and their Soyuz/Apollo Space Hardware playlist.

See Robot Languages and Another Lunar Lander Fail and the AI Robot Apocalypse.

With modern equipment (including a Spectrum Analyser that takes 10 minutes to boot up Windows, because it calls out to Microsoft to check licences, ...) 

And it goes on, ... their transmitter/receiver pair had been retuned, probably as part of the GEOS3 program. See https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/GEOS-3

Reverse engineering the up-data link test system:

 

11:31 They had two switches: essentially to prevent the Russians from sabotaging the mission by reprogramming the space ship in flight!

 

3:10 NASA at some point afterwards switched the sub-bit encoding, ... nobody knows why, ... Discovering the weird missing inductors in the modem:

I wonder whether maybe this is because the ISS actually uses the same S-Band system, and they didn't want people to be able to hack the ISS? 

Subscribe to Curious Marc.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Steven Johnson - So You Think You Know How to Take Derivatives?

Image
A derivative is linearisation, and differential calculus is essentially linear algebra, ...  See  Freya Holmér - Why Can't You Multiply Vectors?  and  Freya Holmér on Continuity of Splines . See also the MIT OCW page:  Matrix Calculus For Machine Learning And Beyond  (Alan Edelman, Steven G. Johnson) Subscribe to The Julia Programming Language . Alan Edelman talking about expressing mathematics as computer code. The idea is that you can use computer languages to communicate mathematical ideas precisely to other people. See my comments about functional programming languages here:  https://prooftoys.org/ian-grant/hm/ Subscribe to TEDx Talks .
Read more

Welsh Republic Podcast Talking With Kars Collective on Armenia Azerbaijan Conflict

Image
  In the last 30 hours, Azerbaijan has blocked the Berdzor Corridor (the only route in and out of Artsakh), established a military police presence, threatened to shoot any flying object leaving the capital Stepanakert, and has now cut the gas supply. This is now a blockage. — Kars Collective (Կարսի Կոլեկտիվ) (@KarsCollective) December 13, 2022 Subscribe to Welsh Republic Podcast .
Read more

Hitachi HD44780U LCD Display Fonts

Image
I finally got the bit-mapped fonts from the Hitachi "1602" display :  Here's some JavaScript: const HD44780U01ASCII=[ [],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[], [],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[], [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ], [4, 4, 4, 4, 0, 0, 4, 0, 0, 0, ], [10, 10, 10, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ], [10, 10, 31, 10, 31, 10, 10, 0, 0, 0, ], [4, 15, 20, 14, 5, 30, 4, 0, 0, 0, ], [24, 25, 2, 4, 8, 19, 3, 0, 0, 0, ], [12, 18, 20, 8, 21, 18, 13, 0, 0, 0, ], [12, 4, 8, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ], [2, 4, 8, 8, 8, 4, 2, 0, 0, 0, ], [8, 4, 2, 2, 2, 4, 8, 0, 0, 0, ], [0, 4, 21, 14, 21, 4, 0, 0, 0, 0, ], [0, 4, 4, 31, 4, 4, 0, 0, 0, 0, ], [0, 0, 0, 0, 12, 4, 8, 0, 0, 0, ], [0, 0, 0, 31, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ], [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 12, 12, 0, 0, 0, ], [0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 0, 0, 0, 0, ], [14, 17, 19, 21, 25, 17, 14, 0, 0, 0, ], [4, 12, 4, 4, 4, 4, 14, 0, 0, 0, ], [14, 17, 1, 2, 4, 8, 31, 0, 0, 0, ], [31, 2, 4, 2, 1, 17, 14, 0, 0, 0, ], [2, 6, 10, 18, 31, 2, 2, 0, 0,...
Read more