UNIVAC 1540 Magnetic Tape Unit...I wonder if anyone has a 800 BPI, NRZ Master Head Alignment Tape (skew tape) to donate to VCF.
7 track or 9 track? The Univacs are pretty old even for "vintage". Also, as Dave McGuire noted, a lightly-used tape from a known-good drive will be useful. In the floppy-disk world, I use several diskettes each from a known good drive to validate "alignment". Seems to me, there's likely several boxes of mag-tapes in the inventory. Herb -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net
On 06/17/2017 11:37 AM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
UNIVAC 1540 Magnetic Tape Unit...I wonder if anyone has a 800 BPI, NRZ Master Head Alignment Tape (skew tape) to donate to VCF.
7 track or 9 track? The Univacs are pretty old even for "vintage".
Also, as Dave McGuire noted, a lightly-used tape from a known-good drive will be useful. In the floppy-disk world, I use several diskettes each from a known good drive to validate "alignment".
That wasn't me. But yes, that can be useful for rough validation.
Seems to me, there's likely several boxes of mag-tapes in the inventory.
Yes, I brought a few boxes several years ago. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
Responding to Dave McGuire. He did not suggest using ordinary mag-tapes for alignment. My slight confusion: he posted that he donated several once-used tapes. Those would be of use for what he calls "rough alignment", which was part of my suggestion based on my 8-inch floppy drive experiences. I did not make the additional point, that most 8-inch floppy drives I find, have no small alignment problems, they have larger problems. Like dirty or worn heads, serious alignment issues, broken electronics, wrong jumper configurations, on and on. Many work OK without touching alignments. Point being, getting an original alignment disk (or mag tape), to fuss with something not broken - until you tweak it - may not be the best strategy. Whereas, reading a set of known-good diskettes (tapes) from several sources, confirms by statistics the alignment, and not just "it works with what I write". and it reduces risk of use, of those alignment media. The analogy may not hold. It doesn't matter, either an appropriate tape will be found, and used; or not. I'm just offering a path forward, with tools at hand. Dave already said he provided written-once tapes. That's good, there's no residual tracks from previous use on previous media, no likely wear, etc. I am not unfamiliar with mag-tapes. herb -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net
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Dave McGuire -
Herb Johnson