On the Emulation of TU58s

[Mark J. Blair]

> On Jun 16, 2015, at 09:10 , tony duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> You would, of course, not know which track it was reading, so you would have to output 2 blocks, one on
> each track, at once. And how would you detect it was writing? Look for an extra signal at the coupling head
> or something?

That seems to me like it would be the trickiest part. The TU58 schematic appears to indicate that there are separate erase head gaps (not on a separate head like in audio cassette drives), so maybe those could be monitored to detect when a track is being written? Of course, that probably means that a custom 4-gap head would need to be made with gaps matching the two read/write and two erase gaps (and a concave surface, too, rather than recycling some audio tape head with suitable geometry to line up with just the read/write gaps.




-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/