On Apr 19, 11:51, Douglas H. Quebbeman wrote:
> The end-result of this project will probably involve
> reading 7-track tapes in analog mode and digitizing
> the analog data stream in order to use modern computing
> power to reconstruct the data.
Well, if you're going to go into digital signal processing, why not just
use a 9-track head, and analyse the data from adjacent tracks to recombine
into 7 tracks? ;-)
I'll bet it's doable. My second-year second-term (10 weeks) assigned
project was to build a barcode reader, using a common slotted optosensor
with an active area whose diameter was about twice the width of the bars,
and a Z80 with 2K EPROM and 8K RAM. It's amazing what you can do with a
little circuitry and a little calculation. 9 tracks to 7 should be easier,
since I expect the top, bottom, and middle tracks will line up nicely. The
second track from the 9-track head would have a mixture of (mostly) 1st and
(a little) 2nd tracks of the 7-track signal; the next channel would have a
roughly equal mixture of data from tracks 2 and 3; the next channel would
be almost all 3; and so on.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
Received on Fri Apr 19 2002 - 13:08:44 BST