Align Up!

摘要

A previously published Tales from the Cube column (Reference 1) brought to memory a similar experience I had with a relay-release time and an attempt to reduce inductive spikes. As a young engineer in the late '60s, I was working on the Apollo instrumentation ships, which NASA used to track and communicate with the Apollo lunar-rnexcursion module. The ships had C-and S-band radars, a satellite-corn antenna, a telemetry-tracking antenna, a VHF/UHF command-and-control communication antenna, and a large data-processing center. Each of the antennas provided azimuth- and elevation-position-synchro data to a central network.rnThis network allowed selection of any antenna's position data for making one antenna act as a slave to another antenna. Large synchro amplifiers drove 23 small synchro amps to amplify the synchro-position data.