Reading VMS backup tapes

Well, I have a real VAXstation here, with a tape interface that probably works, and I probably still have ESDI drives with VMS on them. But.... I have great difficulty thinking it is that simple. I got simh to teach my kids some machine language programming on the PDP-11. (We had a class last Sunday.) I appreciate the offer, but this would be a last resort. I know VMS darn well, I was system manager and general developer on two VAX systems, and then on Alpha systems for a number of years. I ran a MicroVAX (KA-630) in my home from 1986 to 2007 when the hard drive broke. I upgraded it over the years, wrote my own driver for a 3rd party tape controller that never had a VMS driver, wrote a driver and built an interface for a Jupiter 7 graphics system, and interfaced a bunch of home energy monitoring stuff to it. Also attached a VCB-02 color graphics board set to it, which was never really supposed to work on a KA-630, but it did. Just the console wouldn't work right through the VCB-02, so sometimes I had to hook up a serial terminal. But, although I REALLY liked VMS 20+ years ago, I have moved on, and am now pretty comfortable in Linux. (Do miss the regularity of VMS, if you know how to specify the options of one command, then all similar commands will be the same.) The purpose of this exercise is to recover archival programs before the tapes turn into dust. If all else fails, I suppose I could go that way, but this vmsbackup program seems to try to work, it probably needs a little tweak. It detects the 80 byte header records and stops. All the VMS Backup tapes I've checked so far have two 80 byte headers, this program seems to want one 256-byte header. Jon