[vcf-midatlantic] How's everyone doing?

ajpierson1 ajpierson1 at yahoo.com
Fri Mar 27 05:58:16 EDT 2020


        Been working from home to keep us on the air.  Fortunately, it's much easier to keep a TV station operational when you don't have to keep the studio spaces running, and more than half of the employees aren't generating new trouble tickets.  In the mean time, I've played through Doom Eternal which was amazing.  I've also repaired my Heathkit H89's power problems which knocked it out of commission on Friday night of VCF East last year.  A TO-3 socket for one of the 5V regulators was damaged, and while I was making the repairs the other day, I swapped the old linear regulator for a drop-in switch mode supply (also in a TO-3 package).  So far, I've had good luck with those in a VIC-20 and a 1541 drive, thus it seemed like a natural choice to reduce heat output in my H89.  I've also had way more group voice chats with friends around the world these past few weeks, mostly talking about vintage computer topics.  In this way, a few of us helped one friend through some H89 diagnostics and repair which has brought the machine back to life (mostly).  I believe he will be using it for his VCF exhibit soon enough.  Last week, I was also taking a crack at implementing Glitchbus on the Cactus, but that's been sidelined for the moment.  I also took a brief (and isolated) drive out to my storage unit last week to drop off projects I don't have space for at the moment.  If any of you are familiar with the Votrax SC-01-A speech synthesizer chip, I scored a Type'N Talk on ebay recently, and spent some time figuring out how to interface with it properly.  It sounds great, and I was not expecting to find an entire 6802 based machine inside the tiny chassis.I've always got a stack of projects to tackle, so this really isn't all that different for me.  We'll get thru this with a little vigilance, patience, and isolation. -Alexander 'Z' Pierson


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