Apollo Comms Part 31: UDL Grand Opening and Power Up 

They scanned all sorts of stuff for us: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9fGurEa3EVk.html

Let's put that out on a tray...... Nice!

On set, we contract out all the jokes to TubeTime ;-)

Dry Nitrogen actually. Pressurized for convective cooling and to keep out moisture.

Something the Boeing Starliner couldn't do for 2 weeks ... smh

Or pressure more exactly

@@stevenflogerzi1955 All helium storage systems leak. Most companies don't report it because it's not a big deal.

@@stevenflogerzi1955helium, not nitrogen on star liner is the problem

Ha, ha, ha, probably not as the old analog stuff seems to hold up better though primitive than the fragility of the PC boards of the solid-state stuff.

@@superbmediacontentcreator The "old analog stuff" had plenty that failed, it simply has available replacements for many components. Capacitors are one obvious category. Some types have entirely failed, while most types have so likely degraded that they should alway be replaced. Usable substitutes can be readily found, but there is little hope of finding ones that look original. That's especially especially true when multiple capacitors were wound in a single case. More modern equipment does have far more unique components with no substitutes, but many reliability and aging problems were solved.

Except that none of it will be repairable because nobody has diagrams / schematics & by the time companies are old enough to be public domain they're out of business & never released their stuff. Or they're intentionally made impossible to service. Not trying to be pessimistic, just frustrated by the lack of any ability to fix things these days.

@@danl6634 Anything newer than DOS era is basically a write off. It's true for everything, the chance of custom IC's and microchips that have programming are too high. 9x era graphics cards are a big problem, they are just new enough and complicated enough that it takes a long time to write an emulator for. But old enough that the current generation doesn't support those API's. We are well within a computing dark age between archives being removed, generative AI, and hardware being unobtainable.

@@danl6634 You are certainly not incorrect, but if I may contribute what I hope is not a too optimistic forecast of the future of "ancient" computer collecting: My sense is that there will be many, _many_ computers which will be made, between now and a millennium from now, to have a more than sufficient "supply" of collectable computers; indeed, as these things always work, the paucity of those few computers that will nevertheless survive into the future, will be conserved into intermediary collections, including museums, with adequate time and effort then put into conserving _with them_ documentation, both of software and hardware, as you address here. _Survival of the fittest!_

If you believe Wikipedia you’d be right! I had wrongly assumed it would be European because of the metric dimensions and the name. That makes more sense that they used it in Apollo now.

@@CuriousMarc The standard measures in the US have been metric for many years they then convert to US imperial I have a 1998 GM Suburban all the nuts bolts are metric.

​@@CuriousMarc Looks to be true, you can find company registration and patent (US2892991A) from 1955. Not much on the 17 years prior to that though.

We used similar Deutsch connectors in Learjets. They were quite robust and pretty expensive. The crimpers for the contacts were very precise compared to all the other crimpers for various connectors.

Interesting. I thought they were German too, haha.

I can't lie, I was waiting for the brownout with everything switched on

Just don't get the tri-nitro kind!! 😁 Toluene is nasty stuff, best use it outside or in a fume hood and far away from ignition sources.

Is there a way to dissolve it? i.e. get the pancake of boards separated but hopefully not destructive in any way to the parts.

@@marcusdambergeryep toluene or where i work we use humiseal so we use there thinners and stripper. Ill get the part numbers next week but the smell is strong

Just remember that the xyro up transceiver is used in the Doppler heterodyne phase locked loop transmogrifier to achieve complete sublinkage of the over assemblies. Just repeat that in mantra 50 million times and you will be able to follow along 😅😊😊

It's about the data uplink to the Apollo Guidance Computer. Mission control can remotely access the flight computer of the Apollo spacecraft with the gray box they have opened (and closed because it's completely sealed inside). The whole apollo spacecraft can be remote controlled with a digital communication. Nothing fancy, most space probe launched before the Apollo program had digital upload and download path. The interesting thing is that the digital data was all mixed with voice and analog TV signal. A bit like Teletext! (wich, for the record, was launched only two years after the last Apollo mission)

How about making a YT playlist starting with the first AGC restoration video?

LM had the same capability.

Thank YOU!

It is a 3 axis knee mill with an Acu-rite G2 CNC control and servos. Search "KTM-3VKF CNC w/ MillPwr"

They had parts of it tested with the latest KeySight equipment and I believe two small stacks would have replaced pretty much everything on the table using software defined modulators and such.

Under 1000 transistors on a chip. You could easily inhale 1000 such chips with no ill effect.

No, in this case it's a really good sign. It means moisture has been kept out for 50 years plus. Much higher probability that it'll work right out of the box.

Looking at the schematics from CSM 114, which is the one we show in the video and is linked in the description, the five non resettable relays are: Abort A, Crew Alarm, ACE CMC zero enable/disable, ACE CMC one enable/disable, and TRDC normal/bypass. Abort A light and Crew Alarm were ground commands only (Abort B is resettable though). I think the ACE is to load the AGC with data on the ground through the umbilical, so also a ground function. TRDC is Tape Recorder/Data Conditioner. The ground was commanding the data recorder during the flight. So it all makes sense.

@@CuriousMarc I get why you'd want TRDC not to switch back to normal (if broken UDL switched it to bypass, it's presumably not very terrible, and if it should be in bypass, we don't want to switch it over accidentally or as part of debugging UDL). For crew alert (if it gets stuck on, it'll trigger master alarm exactly once and apart from that will just illuminate an indicator) and abort light I don't see any reason to go one way or another, so I guess it could have been more convenient for a reason I'm not seeing. What I'm confused about is the ACE stuff: it's clearly intended to be in the reset position at all times after launch, so why would we want a haywire UDL setting these relays to not be overridable?

@@robertobryk4989 The power connector has 4 reset pins, each of which resets 8 relays. The typical configuration left the first pin unwired, and connected the other three to the reset position of the switch. To your point, because there is not a lot of granularity, if you want to have a single relay be not resettable by the crew, there need to be at least 7 others. Those could be things you actually want them to not be able to reset, or things where it doesn't matter. I think the ACE one and zero relays fit into the "it doesn't matter if the crew can't reset this" category. The AGC only has one pair of transformer-coupled "one" and "zero" input pins for uplink. By closing the ACE relays, the "one" and "zero" wires from the umbilical get added to those nets. But since the umbilical is gone, there's an open circuit at that interface, so all that really happens is some wires with nothing at the other end get attached to the UDL-AGC connections. This will introduce a bit of extra capacitance, which won't affect the signal much. And any noise picked up by these wires is likely to be common-mode, which will be rejected by the transformer inputs in the AGC.

"You can make it better, but you can't make it more expensive" is how our 911 peeps talk about Motorola

No it’s just the relays we show at the bottom of the unit. Nothing would “move” on the panel, but some would turn on a barberpole or a light indicator.

No, we run it well below license power just to get from one end of the table to the other.

If it is modulated. For sure.

The modulator module is modular.

You may be thinking of the quaint edge lit displays. There is a tear-down on the FranLab channel.

Up-link data communications from ground to spaceship.

Machined in this episode, when we had trouble opening the PMP: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-v1SGDbpeFFg.html

And the wood chisel to break open the seal 🤣

@@nickm8134 The duality of man: More electronic diagnostic equipment than a small space program and then 'those'.

Indeed. I always loved cord-laced wire looms. Check out s3vi.ndc.nasa.gov/ssri-kb/static/resources/nasa-std-8739.4a.pdf for how to do it.

17/64ths sounds a weird bastard sort of size to me :)

@@zebo-the-fat 6.746875mm. OK, I agree.

Buzz aldrin is still alive.. !! He might know!!

Marc really needs to collab with Steve1989 for these module openings lol

i'm glad someone heard me saying it! Marc was talking and you can't really hear it clearly.

The equipment is a thousand times better than what russia tried to use.

@@afberglund2764 And the USSR gave up, didn't they!

...most of them were former test pilots, accustomed to turning unknown and unreliable technology into reliable technology. A fearless and intelligent mindset is required!

Understand it was the best and brightest involved in every stage of the design, production, qualification. The equipment is astonishingly rugged.

This equipment is a million times better than what the DEI hires of today can produce.

GOAT!

Best part. Not coldest.

That’s what occurred to me too

That’s a good idea! I had not thought about it.

Yes but... if it isn't broke.. leave it alone!

@@zebo-the-fat Absolutely. But the thinking is to have thought through a few options ahead of time for a repair plan, if the UDL does not work. Viewers suggestions are quite helpful, sometimes we overlook something in the heat of the action!

I want someone to capture the Snoopy LEM, restore it and upgrade it with a nuclear battery, put it into lunar orbit and communicate with it.

It still wouldn't convince any of the moon landing conspiracy theory proponents though, I don't think even being there in person and seeing the actual boot prints with their own eyeballs would convince , it'd be 'oh, It must be aliens then', or a 'rover thingy that could leave boot prints'.

they are! Mike recently printed the housing matching the connector on the -- oh, you'll have to wait for the video. you'll love it!

your phone does do slightly more and may be a little smaller tbf

​@@zyebormand my cell phone does all these things very reliable tbh