23 May
2015
23 May
'15
10:11 a.m.
On 2015-05-23 19:04, Mark J. Blair wrote:
I got my TK50 drive from eBay. Boy, that tape feeding
mechanism sure looks screwy! I'd like to get a modern DLT drive for my modern computer
backups (after I sell a few more kidneys, that is), but I'm still a bit suspicious of
their similar (identical?) tape feeding scheme. All of my bad experience with things like
QIC, DAT, etc. had led me to be very suspicious of tape systems other than 1/2" open
reel.
It's not that bad. The TK50 sometimes get the pickup unhooked from the
arm, but once you realize how it works, it's really easy to fix it when
that happens. Apart from that, the tape movement works fine. When the
pickup lead gets unhooked you cannot even put a cartridge in.
The other problem (as I mentioned) is dirty heads. That will cause the
tape to fail to actually load, since the heads will move up and down
trying to find track 1 and eventually give up. At which point you see it
flashing quickly red on the load button.
The third issue is a general problem with just one button expected to do
all functions, and just one lamp in the button indicating issues. The
drive can just get confused, and you cannot tell what it is doing, and
it is not possible to unload the tape. Very annoying. You can usually
solve that by power cycling the thing.
This all worked better in the TK70. I guess they had to figure things
out by trial and error. :-)
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol