Al, Jay, you may be able to pull this off with the HP 16500 and State mode output. If you get the 4mb deep trace, you would have a fairly long buffer of data, and might be able to read some long records. If you can get the 16600 or the 16500C with a 16505 remote unit, you can run the analyzer interactively with a linux box and I assume trigger the tape unit to move and stop, so you could essentially digitize the length of the tape. The 16600 analyzer state info would already be able to give you the digital output shown in the link below. Jim Jay West wrote: