And regarding nuclear research, I remember a field engineer telling
me about selling a lot of transient digitizers to the nuclear
research community. They'd put a TD down a hole with a bomb with the
cabling leading to the blockhouse a couple of miles away. They'd
blow up the bomb and the TD would send the signal out of all the
stuff they were monitoring -- about 1???s before it went into total
meltdown -- and then in the blockhouse monitoring station, they'd
wait for the signal to show up and then after it was captured, high-
speed clamps shut the lines down so the the massive EMP that was
right on the tail of the data didn't totally destroy all the
monitoring equipment. But the poor transient digitizers .... they
got to make one and only one measurement in their entire lives before
that serial number ceased to exist. Danged expensive probe!
Dean
Yes, I think a lot of 519 scopes suffered a similar nuclear fate. In those
cases, they used polaroid cameras on them and the scopes and cameras were not
exactly melted down . . . just radiated so intensely that they were too "hot"
for anyone to use. As I understand it, some guy in a protective suit would
go rescue the exposed film and they would bury the scopes and cameras. Those
were "one-shot" deals, too. There are some pretty pristine 519's in a vault
somewhere . . .
Stan
w7ni@...
