Tape Loop Announcer Featured on Techmoan Fixed And Wired Up!

so techmom put up this video the other week called a common yet unseen device it was a telephone exchange announcer which has a tape loop that has a lot in common with uh the tape loops on tape echo devices much like the roland space echo to name a one anyway this device has a nearly around a minute long tape loop in the top of it it doesn't have reels or anything like that just to improve reliability because the thing is if you look at it it's actually quite hard for that thing to get taffled up there they won't be able to bend or anything it's actually quite an ingenious way of doing things in the video tecmo managed to get the machine up and running however it wasn't actually sending out any audio he managed to hear what was on the tape by plugging the tape cartridge straight into some other amplifiers however getting the audio out of the machine was still a bit of a mystery so i got in contact with tecmo to see if i was able to sort of do a video on it to try and get it going and plug it into my telephone exchange stuff and after getting a go ahead from neil neil's garage was where this uh item was stored for the past couple of decades well i trotted off over and managed to strike one thing off my bucket list which was meeting techbone as well as uh picking up this announcer we made our service station to take it out of his boot and put it into my boot and i had a 20 minute chat and yeah what a lovely fella anyway i picked it up a week ago and this video is documenting the technical journey i've had over the past week with it so here is the magical piece itself i've already taken the front off in the video techmon explained that the motor wasn't working it just needed a little bit of a nudge to get running and that is happy days we can see it running anyway so it is working well the motor's working at least the cut for the loop is right there you might see it well it's going through now and now the other end there's a little kink on it uh so that's where the uh loop connection is so it's still running which is happy days however there were problems with the sound so we need to figure that out so the next step is to open it up luckily it's nice and serviceable in the field so everything comes apart it's just connected by a few connectors here and there i'm gonna remove this for a sec if you look in there you can see all of the parts so this is the amplifier board and the power supply um the rear of the connector is right here so the first thing i'm going to do is figure out where all of these wires are going so if you've watched tecmon's video you'll know that there are two outputs on the front uh gather these are for testing at the exchange but on the back is actually the connection that is connected to all of the other pieces of equipment and with this specific model which was a mid 80s one well it's got this funky port right here which you may recognize oh i see okay okay these two grey wires right here this one right here and this one right here seems to go in to the power supply connector so i'm guessing there's a switch in here that would maybe switch on and off these oh yeah here we go so this definitely looks like the relay that controls the whole shebang with any luck this relay should still relay things so at this point of time i didn't have a massive amount of information on this thing so i figured the next best thing to do was to mock up a little cable that would connect into here so we can make a breakout box so we can plug whatever we need to plug into this thing now i could put another connector on the other side and go to town but i'm not going to bother i'm going to make this quite a short cable because i always need this stuff anyway scuzures so i've just built this it's a breakout for it just the piece of ribbon cable that's been broken out onto a bit of strip board so when i finished putting that breakout board together i was looking on a stroud telephone exchange forum and somebody actually picked up one of these when they saw tecmon's video on it a couple of weeks ago no idea where they found it because these things are pretty sparse but pretty awesome theirs was working and they were able to listen to the audio straight from the front jacks and if you'd seen tekmon's video where you know that isn't the case with this one so uh yeah there's obviously something wrong with it alas it seems that there may be a little bit of a problem it just doesn't seem to play let's have a look because there's a couple of missing capacitors here so i decided to start having a bit of a poke around and do some testing here and there and see where the problem was so the 12 volts which is coming out of this adjustable power supply which i'm guessing this circuit board could be the capacitor that could be gone um 14 volts it's going incorrect 14 volts ac is going into this power supply however um we have got zero volts coming out of this power supply or problems in this little box so i took this little circuit board out to take a closer look what this circuit board is supposed to do is take 14 volts ac and send out 12 volts dc however it was sending out pretty much zero volts so there was a problem here if you see there there's a couple of dark spots these are directly under some resistors so these resistors were getting a little bit too hot these resistors were going over to the capacitors which made me figure that these capacitors weren't capacitating so i decided the first port of call was to replace those resistors and those capacitors and see how it went i just want to find out if it's going to work so i've got these slightly oh god they're way oversized i'm just going to do it anyway i'm going to give it a go anyway let's see if we can get this working shall we luckily that was the problem because if it was the transistors there were some weird obsolete things that were hard to get hold of i was sort of preparing myself to make a strip board replacement for this power ball but luckily the capacitors were the problem right now that is done we can get back to the breakout module so now it's working but also [Music] so what i was doing there was i was sending 50 volts into the relay 50 volts is the standard in telephone exchanges so i figured out the pin out for that and what that relay does is it basically triggers that solenoid that pushes that pinch roller up to make the tape move the tape is really worn and if you could hear there it does still sound like like it did in tech modes where it's like i'm just going to quickly jot out where the pins go using a continuity tester yes so i've just bashed together this project box it's got a little gap there for the uh thing you'll notice there's loads of extra space so oh no don't tell them upside down oh he's only gonna done it upside down oh what a plonker ah that's annoying well it's gonna be upside down so now the announcer seems to work and i've broken out all of the cables in the breakout box let's try and plug it in to the telephone exchange so now i have the announcer here with the breakout box uh the breakout box is wired up to a phone line thing this is just a temporary thing because we're gonna need to be a little bit more involved than this in a little bit there's a phone sucker on the back we need to phone that with this thing right here let's just put this down here leave it off the latch okay let's do it five [Music] seven six two [Music] this is calling we're gonna put this down here so the way this is wired up the second i plug this in it's actually going to answer the call so now we turn on the announcer [Music] now with any luck when we listen on this phone we should hear the announcer going through the telephone [Music] reveal exchanges number using the full fpv code as shown in your phone booth so now we know if we plug the announcer in through the telephone exchange well the audio is literally just going to go straight through into the earpiece but we're not out of the woods yet we need to figure out how to make it work without having to plug it in every time and you know having it constantly running so i did a lot of reading up on pretty much all of the documentation that i've built up over the last couple of months on the telephone exchange to kind of figure out the best course of action for the next step all right so let's draw this bugger i came up with a super low-fi solution that should hopefully work only involving one extra relay per audio channel on the announcer i mentioned my progress on the telephone exchange forum that i've mentioned before and people were extremely helpful suggesting various different methods of the way that they've made it work in the past and it was suggested i should probably add a couple of bits of protection but in the end of the day it was mentioned if it works it works it wouldn't have flown in a normal telephone exchange because there's no protection and you know it's just not what would have been done but this is a museum it's not a 24 7 telephone exchange so a bit of fun a lo-fi solution if it works it works what comes from the switches let's say the big final switch the one that calls it calls the last number well it actually causes the last two numbers of the phone line well what it sends out two call lines is the pair that wires up to your phone and there's also a p wire the p wire which is the private wire is the one that sort of tells other things that hello hello are you listening to me uh so this is it right here the p wires right here 1300 ohm relay which i've got something that sort of does that right here this is gonna have three switches on it basically it's just this simple one that goes from the power into the relay inside of the announcer machine that thing that i was clomping on and off earlier those are gonna flick on as well so then the announcer will send the audio over so what i need to do is find a relay section that's got three switches on it if you look at this relay right here it's got two sets of switches on this side that are connected that could be these two and on this side it's got another connector which is going to connect up the relay so i need to take this call out of there and pop it into here so i went ahead and made a frankenstein relay this is probably not the thing to do but uh what you're gonna do what are you gonna do the next step was getting this relay and somehow putting it into the telephone exchange also off ebay a couple of months ago i got this blank cradle in fact i think these were both from the same cellar i think pop a couple of isolators in pop one of these on i went ahead and did a shoddy wiring job that would probably make any telephone engineer vomit but what are you gonna do what are you gonna do if it works it works right now please remember i'm still figuring this telephone exchange malarkey out i've only really even known they've existed for about two months now but you know so uh what i've done now is i've got the relay box right here and i've wired it rather ropely with this ropey wire over to the back if you look at the back there's this chunky set of connections and we'll look at these closely in a little bit because we're going to take this project a little bit further but all you need to know right now is i have wired this purple wire into the p wire on level one outlet free which means it's wired up to the switch bank on level one output three which is right here and right here because there's two sets of switches so that means when this final selector gets up to level one outlet three uh this is hopefully going to make this relay do its relay thing so how we do that is we make the phone call first up we need to call the first numbers that are assigned to the first free which is a five [Music] seven eight and now we're on this final switch you'll notice it's a lot bigger because what this final one does is it chooses uh where it needs to allocate this will be in these will all be in different telephone exchanges for instance this would send it straight over to another one but this one what we need to do is we need to type it into one which is only going to flip up one section and now we need to type in three which makes it go over to the pin that we want so now i know this relay is going to do the job on that phone number five seven eight one three so now i need to connect all of the other connectors onto this rear uh kind of point and then we'll also connect all the outputs that connect up to this thing right here so as you can see there are designated chunks here and there are actually numbers you can't quite see them on top saying like level one level two level three level four and this is the levels uh how where the actual switch is lift up to on the switchbank and all of these little connect collections of four different connectors you'll see here it says even an odd and then it's got m p minus and plus these are all designated to the uh switch cradle in fact here is an example uh ignore this top row this is a different type of switchbank but basically how this works is these are coordinates of these different switchbanks you'll see that there are different contacts on the top and the bottom these different levels that go along chunk chunk chunk at the different levels of go up so level one two three four five six seven eight nine and zero uh there we go and then all of these odd and even these uh connection collections of four are actually the switches that are selected so you're basically selecting coordinates on the bank so these three wires that i need for the announcer are connected to level one so it's level one right here these chunks so this is the first set of contacts in that bank and then the next one is the third set of contacts because it's odd so it goes one two three four and so on so the purple is the private wire that's the one that says hello is anybody there and then these two are the actual connectors that are going to be connecting the audio through the switches so i'm going to get these wires going through this hole right here so it's nice and neat this bit right here is actually the poles that connect to the relay bank that we're going to be talking to the announcer right here so we need to get these over to here in a neat version there we go nice so now i've also got to get some wires going out of this that go over to the announcer as you can see there here number this one this one and this one so i need to connect these to the back oops forgot to put the relay set on [Music] oh there we go i don't know i forgot to have an earth connection okay attempt to number four maybe three or something i i did a load of stupid rookie errors for starters it wasn't even plugged into the back of the uh uh announcer okay here we go [Applause] hey just got a dodgy relay yes all right lemon works i am so pleased with that we're going to sort out all of these wires and then we're going to have a look at trying to replace this tape so we can conserve this because it's nearly added so this announcer has the ability of having two different announcements on it at any one time so what i did is i made another relay circuit so another telephone number can be called in to here another completely separate announcement to the other one so you could call up one announcement or you can call up the other one the way it does that is on this stereo tape loop the left channel is one announcement and the right channel is another announcement in this instance with this rather warm and muffly tape loop well the other side is completely empty so it seems like a perfect opportunity to focus our attention onto the actual tape loop itself and make a new version to stop this one from getting any more worn out and to also add another announcement onto the other channel and that's where this reel to reel comes in back in the day somebody's job would have been to record the announcements onto a reel-to-reel player like this and then distribute the tape to make tape loops out of and i think tecmo mentioned one of neil's jobs entailed something like this so what i've done is i've recorded two announcements onto this tape reel one on the right channel and one on the left channel the one on the right channel is the original one i've just tried to eq it a bit so it's a little bit fpv clearer as shown in your phone booth there will be no extra charge for the call if further assistance is required please bring operative services it's a little bit clearer but funnily enough when it goes through the phone it actually sounds a lot better so even if it's muffled you can actually hear what she's saying as for the other announcement that i've recorded on this tape well i hired a pretty dodgy uh person off the internet to do this one so uh have a listen what you think to this one the code you have dialed is no longer available please redial your number using the full std code as shown in your phone book there will be no extra charge to the call if further assistance is required please ring operator services yeah how cool is that so we've got tech moan uh repeating the announcement another plan is when you call up one number you can listen to tech moan and you call up the other number you listen to the original and of course you can listen to both of them at the same time the code you have dialed is no longer available on your phone yeah now what we need to do it's fine to start so that's the start of it so now we know where we need to cut the start of the tape loop so i'm going to cut it about here you're not supposed to do it like that you're supposed to do it like this don't do it like that do it like this so now cut the end of it off with a stanley knife now we've got to find the other end oh all right we're at the end so i'm just going to pull it a little bit further through right so here we go tape loop time you're not supposed to do it like that you're supposed to do it like this no that's awful you don't do it like that [Music] you're going to eliminate so now we've got a tape loop it doubles up as a lovely fashion accessory but now we've just got to get put into the announcer right let's do this shall we let's remove the top covers so we're going to remove this one first oh oh okay all a little bit in order here and now we've got to put the next one in oh gosh this is going to be a nightmare i'm just keeping an eye out for any uh any taffles like right now the tape loop that i've made is slightly longer than the original so it's a bit it might be a bit of a squeeze but it's looking good it's looking good oh [Music] and now we go oh we're we're nearly there oh it's just stuck there we go it's in number using the fall in your phone book yeah there will be no extra charge to the call if further assistance is required please ring operator services all right there's that one there's uh channel one okay we're in luck now let's go and get this plugged in and see if we can get it all working as it should do the code you have filed is no longer available carefully value and however using the full ftv code as shown in your phone booth there will be no extra charge for the calls the strategic assistant is required finishing offers and services [Music] the code you have dialed is no longer available please redial your number using the full std code as shown in your phone book there will be no extra charge to the call if further assistance is required please ring operator services one thing i forgot to mention in the video was i initially recorded a tape loop at the wrong speed i recorded it slow because i thought that you know the telephone exchange they weren't that bothered about uh the quality so make a slower tape loop to increase the durability but i was wrong sounded like a chipmunk and also not to mention you can call in on the announcer well with any phone really at some point i'm gonna actually have an external input uh so you'll be able to phone into the museum and also listen to take my own handy another announcer so i can call it from any phone in the museum which is which is cool so that worked out pretty well i'm quite pleased about that there's going to be another video in a few days on the museum of everything else youtube channel about how this is going to be displayed and set up and stuff you might be able to even come over and see this in the next couple of weeks depending on how this whole covert stuff plays out check the museum of everything else website for more information on that but this isn't the end of the story for the announcer 9a in this video no these announcer 9a's actually had a number of other uses so i've been sharing the progress on multiple videos over on patreon on this in the last week and there was a comment from stephen anderson mentioning the dialer disc this is a piece of technology that you used to be able to phone in and listen to like the number one at that point in time so you would call up and it would be like you know like the human league or something he mentioned the story that back in 1983 his mum let him phone in every so often and call up the dialer disc and the thing that got me thinking was the fact that he mentioned that he started at random points in the song he showed a link to a website that had this image of dialer disc on it and funnily enough what you're looking at there is a similar setup to what we actually have right here there's a record player in the middle you will put the song record on there and then you'd set the reel to reel to record that song from the record player and then you'd make a tape loop out of that and put that in one of the announcer 9a's which was situated at the bottom of the rack so amazingly enough dialer disc was one of these as well i thought it was something else so there you go another thing that stephen mentioned before we connected the dots in the comments was the fact that he heard the dialer disc was reused from the technology used to read out the cricket scores so the announcer 9a was probably reading out cricket scores on the phone as well so these things were even more prevalent than you might have thought some of you are probably thinking and about to comment saying sam put a song on one of these instead well we're gonna actually be doing that with another piece of technology that's reasonably similar to this in another video but for now for this video i think we've covered enough on the announcer 9a also it's worth mentioning an amazing piece of technology that has a similar purpose to this it's the speaking clock that was on the other side of the telephones that was an arrangement of optical audio discs truly an amazing piece of technology and uh yeah i don't know whether i'm ever going to come across one of those but it's worth a look into anyway that's pretty much it for this video if you want to support these projects and the constant creation of these videos then please go and check out on patreon or youtube membership there's also a handful of audio bits from this that i've included over there that you can download amongst loads of other samples and sounds and this that and the other and you can watch back all the builders live streams and the vlogs and the trials and tribulations of projects like this trying to get these things working throughout the week as well as seeing loads of other projects and stuff and getting your name on a knob i'm going to be doing a public live stream within the next week putting the rest of the patrons names on the knobs in the museum so if you want your name on a knob though no yeah go and check it out over there anyway i want to thank techmone this is the announcer 9a i'm lukemum no computer if you like what you see don't forget to subscribe and yeah don't be scared to try it

Channel: LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER

Views: 107,222

Rating: 4.9824309 out of 5

Keywords: techmoan, tape, tape looping, history, science, restoration, repair, diy, music, look mum no computer, electronics, telephone, telephone exchange, colin furze, the 8 bit guy, big clive

Id: qvzH7DSsD3g

Length: 24min 52sec (1492 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/neckcarpenter]

This guy’s a fun subscribe. Creative and fearless!

[u/Squid_Vicious_IV]

I love this guy! If it's not musical experiments just to see if he can, he's so fearless about just ripping stuff open and seeing how to fix it. I always learn something every time I watch him.