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Teac HR-40 data recorder, what is it?

I just won these: and I'm now not so sure they were a smart purchase :)

They have two 7-pin chassis-mount "slightly military style" connectors, and another identical connector on a short captive cable. I had assumed they were simply ruggedized cassette mechanisms with an interesting input, but now I received them I realize they have a bunch of switch settings and apparently several recording channels - not just the usual 4.

Does anyone have some concrete idea what these are - PWM recorders? I want to use them to record an audio-type signal. The cassette thus produced doesn't need to be compatible with any other recording device. Teac's aerospace site suggests this was designed for medical and vehicular telemetry gathering, but they have no data on this specific model.

Reply to
larwe
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Hey come on, for $9.99 you got a bargain! I think the connectors are Lemo, and it's worth it for them alone. As for the recorder, I'm sorry I don't have any data but I did carry one around for a couple days a few years back. It was connected to a whole bunch of electrodes monitoring heart activity. Luckily they found no problems.

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John B
Reply to
John B

Lest we forget, the seller adds a handling charge on top of shipping, so the total was in fact $38.58 :)

Reply to
larwe

Well, I opened one up... wow. Yes those are Lemo connectors, but since they're single-use crimp type, that's not a lot of use to me. They look extremely expensive.

Internally the recorder has ten removable SIP daughterboards on a large mainboard, another daughterboard for the servo controller, and another two daughterboards for the LCD time stamp counter and some other stuff. The SIP boards are preamps for each individual channel (it is a 9-channel recorder) and also a power regulation module.

Beautifully constructed, seems to be working perfectly, but it's totally useless to me because it is record-only :(

Reply to
larwe

Oh well, $50 worth of write only memory then. ;-)

There's got to be some sort of matching playback device. Maybe you could track down one of those. IIRC a standard C90 tape lasted 48 hours per side.

Anyway, I bet you had a fun Saturday taking one apart just to see how it worked.

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John B
Reply to
John B

The speed is adjustable. Instead of the usual motor-with-a-regulator driving a belt (found in regular cassette players) this unit has a stepper motor driving teeth on a large brass wheel; the capstan is on the shaft of this wheel. The takeup spool is driven by a belt takeoff, apparently set up so it spins a little faster than the maximum necessary, with a slip bearing to avoid stretching the tape.

Reply to
larwe

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