[time-nuts] Trak 8810 Station Clock

[Chris Quayle]

Hi

> It’s a pretty good guess that a device from that era ran a “downconverter” head end.
> They had a full RF front end out at the antenna and fed some sort of IF frequency
> back to the unit. Various outfits had approaches to how to do it. The net result is that
> the head end is pretty specific to this or that box (or at least series of boxes).
>
> Since it’s an entirely different approach to getting things done, directly replacing the
> head end with a modern module is going to be tough. The normal alternative is to
> build up a downconverter. Some do it from scratch, others find a similar unit
> somewhere and modify it to do the job. The big trick is to find out exactly what the
> main box is looking for ….
>
> Bob


I had wondered about that, but if you look at the antenna input, it
looks like pretty high frequency, with a track inductor. Would
assume that a downconverter from gps frequency would
translate to baseband, but may be wrong.

Took a few pics of the board, in case it looks familiar to
anyone, but it must have been used on other, perhaps marine or
avionics kit of the time. Problem is finding such an item, say
on Ebay, without taking the lid off to verify contents. Have a
feeling this quest may take some time :-).

Here are the pics anyway:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/182770787@N05/

Regards,

Chris