On Dec 11, 2011, at 4:12 PM, Bill Hawkins wrote: > Fascinating. I also have one of these with slight differences, but it > does have a Fort Meade tag. Bought it from a guy on the BoatAnchors > list in Atlanta in the dim past. > > The HTID number is H9823180065821, NSN 664500DISPLAY, User ID STWA104 > > The rotary switch adds a 160 KHz position. The two switches are marked > CODE POLARITY and POWER ON. The rear panel has a 4 pin circular jack > labeled AUX and a 24 pin rectangular connector marked PARALLEL.
Yeah, mine has those connectors also. Fair also had some with LED displays. > A partly torn tag taped to the top says Made by TRAK, Model ?? 2234/U, > SN 517. A plastic envelope contained a DD Form 1348-1A release/receipt > document from the Defense Reutilization Marketing Office at Meade. It > released 5 of these units worth $1500 each, dated 1-29-98, ship from > H98231 (in HTID number above) to SX1213 (marketing office?). > > Somewhere I'd heard that these units were for locating times on tape > recordings of intercepts. The different filter frequencies are for > different tape speeds, from high speed search to fine positioning. > The code might be IRIG but it could just as easily be something the > NSA invented for the purpose. Maybe part of Project Boresight? <http://jproc.ca/rrp/boresight.html> > I bought it because I'd visited the NSA museum at Fort Meade and seen > the code breaking machines. I didn't find them intimidating at all. > The gift shop would sell me a jacket with NSA logos, but I didn't > know where I would wear it. There is a certain cachet to having a > box that was used by top secret agents to decode radio intercepts. > > Bill Hawkins > > P.S. I'd recommend doing some signal tracing from the Input connector. > We have no idea what signal levels were used, if it wasn't IRIG. I > never found time to do that. Yeah, that'll be on my to-do list. I had hoped the frequencies listed on the controls might trigger some association in someone who's knowledgable about time-codes. 250 Hz doesn't seem to be a legal IRIG time-code frequency, although 1 kHz is. Best regards, Steve -- Steve Byan <steveb...@me.com> Littleton, MA 01460 _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.