Apollo Comms Part 27: Quindar Tones Microphone Hack 

Thankyou, the only thing mark left out was where the name came from.

Ooh 😮, that would be useful!!

That would just piss my teammates off. I have to have it!

huh didn’t even know zoom had ptt neat

Or as an external program, so it would be usable by all platforms.

@@rootvalley2 when your MIC is muted you can use the space bar as a PTT key

Seems like a far better method than saying "roger" or "over".

@@stevewalston7089 Indeed plus astronauts are generally already familiar with it so it didn’t make sense to change. It’s one of those things that you keep because it actually works and not because of inertia and resistance to change

​@@stevewalston7089 Huh? What?Who ?

@@muadeeb Maybe the Quindar tones?!

@@muadeeb What's your vector, Victor?

Roger beeps are still popular with the CB crowd.

The Apollo Applications (Skylab) and shuttle programs used much of the same stuff through about 1973-1998. Ground equipment would have been cheap to file away but the spending and focus was getting the remaining very large artifacts, flight ready and ground articles to museums across the nation while the program was still fresh in the mind of the us tax payers. The Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System also reworked the direct to ground, VHF, HF electronics on the spacecraft and was the sole standard communications path by 1998. The interesting item will be the implementation of 5G chipsets and software defined radios into future spacecraft. With communications companies such starlink putting 25,000 bent pipe and packet switched solutions under long term space test, bespoke voice and data solutions are a bit archaic outside of VHF and HF backups to backups. A UHF, HF, VHF and Packet Radio radio set is good to 250,000feet Once on orbit Manned spacecraft will just be temporary space based node in meshes of communications services. The weight of comms gear on the Apollo spacecraft in total must have been non trivial. Comms gear to orbit of Mars or the surface of mars will be dominated by high gain for data delivery, the rest of gear more than likely will be Starlink components with in space histories of more than a decade. The economy of the scale of developing what would be bespoke between NASA and Boeing is just Lego components of SpaceX ecosystem is the amazing part of the story.

I had the same thought. But it could be solved with a VOX circuit AND’d with a timer. If no tone and no audio and we’re past the timeout, then we switch off anyway. Of course most likely this would be noticed and someone would just have to click the mic to get it back I assume.

I mean, gnuradio can do exact FSK, so I can probably get it exactly the same in software in THIS CASE

Can you tell me the word origin of niggle?

I was used to hearing those beeps and never knew what they were. Thank you for the excellent explanation!

They were named after the manufacturer Quindar Electronics.

It's trivial to perfectly recreate these digitally using a microcontroller and an audio DAC

Marc managed to find "Mr Fancy pants" so maybe he can also find the bleep engineers? That would be cool!

With 400,000+ folks working on the program, I don’t doubt they had a dedicated engineer for the beeps.

@@garylucas6511 An engineer for the higher tone and one for the lower tone? ...and a tonal manager to keep the peace in the inevitable turf-war.

Don’t forget this NASA. You would have the higher tone contractor engineer and manager….. AND the lower tone contractor and manager. PLUS the safety NASA engineer and safety manager + their contractors.

@@LostAgain1970 That Person would probably be in his 90s but everything is possible.

That last instrument would be an HP 413AR null voltmeter. Pretty rare to see an “AR”, the rack version of it.

"We Apologize For The Inconvenience."

@@Mrshoujo and other terms from the good book.

Marc chose that one specifically for it's aesthetic and extra mute button that could be repurposed.

Probably just a simple xmit on/off control circuit. Used to have something similar in the Marti RPU great, but it was typically used in a repeater setup and not exactly in band audio

Thank you. Had some of their fm equipment at a station I worked at, and that kinda explains their look

Here is the whole repair adventure of the E&L breadboard system: ru-vid.com/group/PL-_93BVApb582yUOlRmTJYVtPwrs1pbrh

@@CuriousMarc Neat! I would definitely use something like that.

Thus, these notes can be created with the help of two potatoes, ten balls of grape wine, a quarter of a kilo of lemons, several gold and silver bars, three Deuxtelidr decanters and two grams of Tracoquazischutroiridibixtenia. Unfortunately, in today's over-technological age, Deuxtelidre decanters and Tracoquazischutroiridibixtenium are completely unavailable, so it's done the way it's done - simply and brilliantly. Great work 👍 Nice day 😁 Tom