When I was a kid dad was in the FAA. Flight Service Stations had a public area, where pilots would get their briefings and whatnot, an office for the FSS Manager, a kitchen/break area, the area for the Flight Service Specialists that had radio gear, teletypes, weather fax, etc., and a rear area crammed with banks of electronic equipment.
Some of the machines were large reel-to-reel tape machines. (The tapes looked like IBM 9-track tapes.) I gathered they were used to record radio traffic. The other machines were maybe seven feet tall and a couple of feet wide. It was very warm in there, possibly because they seemed to contain a lot of vacuum tubes (even into the 1980s). They each had a couple/few rows of red or green lights on them. I’ve only seen these lights on these machines; nowhere else. They were about an inch in diameter, and domed. They didn’t have ‘bright spots’ like a typical incandescent bulb might have. The domes appeared to have been ‘frosted’ on the inside and the light was very uniform.
You’re probably talking about a Magnasync logging recorder. My father was president of Magnasync (and I worked there right out of high school), so I had quite an exposure to those products.
They were 10-20 track machines using 1/2 to 1 inch tape. All the tracks except one were dedicated to one phone line or radio channel. The last track was devoted to a time code. The speed of the tape was very very very sloooooooow so one tape would last 24 hours. If a tape broke, there was a fail-safe system to immediately transfer to the second deck.
Trying to find a good link or picture to show you. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to come up with one right now.
No, that’s the tape machine. The machine I’m talking about just had rows of large red and green (and possibly amber?) lights on it. Probably some switches too.
Very cool that your dad was president of Magnasync. What Lazlo said.
Wow… that brings back memories. I don’t remember the brand we used, but the linked product manual looks at least similar to what we used as recently as 1993 at fixed-based Army airfields. I used to have to fix 'em when the broke. Ours was in a room with our communications switching equipment (don’t remember any of the proper nomenclatures). It recorded one of each of the major radio channels (ground control, approach, and I think we had a flight following). I seem to recall that it didn’t record each radio per se (individual frequencies), but just the allotted air traffic control function (for example, ground control has FM and VHF radios, but we recorded from the switching system). Fun times.
Maybe is was something like this (on the left)? This appears to be a newish version of the old AN/FSC-92’s that I used to work on, any they themselves were 80’s technology. Progress, I guess. This is the communication switching system I mentioned above (well, part of it).
Or maybe they were the radio banks? Looks like a modern server room, except instead of banks of servers, there are banks of radios. They had lots of lights, such as when they were powered on, being keyed, and so on.
