Destructive Imaging of DECTAPE II Media

shadoooo shadoooo at gmail.com
Sat Jan 31 04:42:01 CST 2015


Hello,
I also have an 11/730, but not working yet and it needs to be restored.
The TU58 are all rusty, so probably should be replaced.
I tried to find a complete TU58 system (mechanics + board) to read the 
cassettes, modify firmware to format DC100,
and in the end to replace the bad one in the 730, but no luck so far 
(anybody has a suggestion on how to find one?)
I have a bunch of cassettes of original software, including console 
tape, but they all suffer from sticky belt problem.
I always avoided to move the tape to avoid the hole spot problem, and 
stored all of them in vacuum packaging together with silica-gel,
waiting for a good restoring procedure and suitable hardware.

In these days I read all these posts about reading the tape in different 
way, that gave me an idea:
I have a TASCAM 4-tracks recorder that was using normal audio tapes.
As the tape width is the same, and also track position is similar, I 
could try to move the tape from a TU58 cassette to an audio cassette,
then read it on the 4-tracks. The machine has a knob to adjust head 
position slightly, so it could help.
I don' t remember if the speed of the tape could be adjusted too (maybe 
normal / double).
Sampling the audio with a good sound card could give some good data to 
be elaborated to extract data,
of course a filtering/recovery algorithm has to be developed (using 
Matlab/Octave)?

If the procedure would prove to be working, I could offer my help to 
image tapes, specially for 730 as they would be very useful
also to restore my machine (I really would like to have diagnostic tapes).

This procedure could work?

Andrea



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