Apollo Comms Part 30: Double PLL Trouble! 

Hmm I wonder who could have programmed that file ;-)… Thanks Steve for making the file and supporting the channel with Electro-Rent test equipment. Video with Steve here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ctNmYFfxI7w.html

and dieodes too

May as well add “Killer hurts”

Don't forget the sloppy disks for vintage computers, and the smoke-emitting diodes.

Dark emitting diodes, DEDs. WOMs. (Write Only Memories) {^_-}

@@Wizardess light emitting resistors!

Align the Circuit - put it in a vice, grab a good dial indicator, tram it to within a tenth of a thou, should be good to go. 😀

A few years ago a group of engineers pulled the turbo pump off of an F1, put in new seals and spruced it up, bolted it to a test stand, fired it up, and subsequently blew out the windows in a nearby building. Yea, the *turbo pump* was rated at 55,000 BHP. By comparison, a GE AC6000CW locomotive is 6,000 BPH, worlds largest container ship is 110,000 BHP (two turbo pumps), and an Iowa class battleship 212,000 shaft horsepower (four turbo pumps). I'd love to see a full F1 back on a stand and fired up. Hard part - finding a stand large enough and remote enough not to cause problems from noise or a possible RUD event.

Yes, but we swear, we tried to turn it off and power it on again! You have to give us some slack though, we don’t have the operating manual for this, so we sort of have to reverse engineer how that is all supposed to work every step of the way. This was all the more puzzling because the phase error dial was really broken, and we had been able to lock it before - before we made downvoice modulation work that is. So that led us astray for a while. But the good thing is that we learned something new in the end.

@@CuriousMarc Wasn't meant as a stab at you All of us do similar stuff with or without an operating manual, whether we admit it or not :D

National's data sheets were out of this world. They were stellar courses in practical electronics. No doubt influenced by Bob Pease.

@@CuriousMarc They were, I learned so much just reading them. I still regret leaving all my books behind when I moved from the UK to the US in the 90's. I have a pristine National Semiconductor NS32000 designers kit with all the data sheets, data books and the chips in a proud spot next to my fireplace. I just stumbled across it on eBay and paid whatever the seller was asking. It's a shame that the DNA Ti absorbed when they acquired National Semiconductor didn't extend to their modern data sheets.

@@vincei4252 Burr-Brown also had great datasheets before the TI acquisition. Fortunately, some of the BB D/A and D/A converter ICs that were manufactured before the acquisition, TI fortunately still provides PDFs of the original BB datasheets with addendums. TI still manufactures some of them. Analog Devices has good datasheets.

Totally agree. Datasheets from some manufacturers are so bare bones.

Part of the decline of data sheets seems to correlate with manufacturers also wanting to stop publishing anything publicly. Data sheets become marketing materials and not a design resource.

I covered fractional-N PLLs a while ago in this video here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-z-50pSc_wg8.html . These were the pre elevator music days!

@@CuriousMarcThanks, didnt see that one yet. It does have elevator music!

Going to Radio Shack was my favorite thing to do in 1980s and 1990s.

@@TheGregEgg I was fortunate to frequent Radio Shack in the early 2000's. I made a lot of dumb stuff with cheap parts!

You are darn right, PLLs are touchy things. And things that work in loops are notoriously difficult to debug when things go awry. Switch mode power supplies also fall into that category. Breaking the loop and testing the individual blocks is often the best approach to troubleshoot, as we did here on the bench.

..do I still have that ttl cookbook? late 90's edition.. brb..

there's at least two different ones!

Marc needs at least a half stack.

I'll make it run on subminiature tubes. Nuvistors even, if I had any.

Did you notice the retrofit kit for the Juno 6/60 at 18:52 ?

@@pjladd04 No

Yup we’re done. Motorola won’t send us any new modules from 1965.

Last episode I tried “13 give a stir to your oxygen tank” but somehow my buddy astronaut on the other end did not appreciate it.

Those weren't "PLL tones." They were "PL tones." PL stands for "Private Line," which is a trademark of Motorola. More generally, they are called CTCSS, for continuous tone-coded squelch system.

@@johnopalko5223 Oh! Thank you for the correction!

Often called DC.... 4G and 5G are above 2 GHz. Now, Shannon tells you something about a channel's capacity given it's bandwidth and noise. In the total absence of noise you can put infinite bandwidth through a keyhole at 1.25 MHz. But, the world is noisy, very noisy compared to cellphone data rates at 1.25 MHz carrier frequency. (BW probably less than 5% of that given components and junk like antennas that goes around the electronics.) At 2 GHz with frequency hopping over +/- 1 GHz you could cram ONE rather wide bandwidth signal through the link given clever signal design and coding. But allocations are smaller than that. And allocations at 10 GHz, for example, are wider than they are at 2 GHz. So for the same noise levels you can cram faster data through 10 GHz than 2 GHz. And it scales fairly well in that fashion through light through fibers. Anything much deeper than that and the elevator music would be drowned out by the exploding heads, I fear. I spend 5.5 years paying a school to cram as much as they could into my head in the mid 60s. And it doesn't quite lead to exploding head syndrome today. I'll defer to ANYBODY else who wants to describe going deeper. I'm blissfully retired. {^_-}

It's an incredible plug-in processor update for a Juno 6 of Juno 60 that a viewer designed and sent to me. It adds not only MIDI to the Juno, but a ton of new capabilities (portamento, monophonic with multi-oscillators, etc...).

F1 engine rocket music quintet. That counts ;-)

Particularly including the whine of the turbopump.

Not to mention our duct tape and super glue technology is much better today, so assembly would be much easier ;-)

@@CuriousMarc 😆

No, the PLL is a post 1950 invention. You must be thinking about a video sync circuit maybe?

@@CuriousMarc sscs.ieee.org/images/files/aboutus/history/ISSCC50/communications/communications_7.pdf 1932 si the first mention, AFAIK

@@CuriousMarc fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_de_Bellescize

But that's not the same thing at all! If you look at Bellescize circuit, it's a coupled oscillator. Which is really a resonant amplifier. Not the Phase Detector / Loop Filter / VCO of a PLL, which is a much later concept.

@@CuriousMarc Did you delete my comment ? Many people credit Bellscize with inventing the PLL, but I don't have access to his original 1932 article at the moment (the diagram in the PDF is Signetics) . Will see if I can find a copy.

Google says so. I can award you some good PLL circuits with bad data sheets.

@@CuriousMarc Just attend VCF west, I'll look for you.

Almost, Google says 2nd, but close enough, we have plenty of bad modern data sheets to award.

I’ll put them next to my copy of the Signetics write only memory data sheet.