Hey all!
I've recently scored a NIM bin full of Ortec spectroscopy amps/analog delay/gating and HV bias stuff, which I believe has been used for gamma spectroscopy at a hospital once.
Here's the strange part: There is one home-brew prototype module in the rack. It is a single width NIM box with 6 BNC's and a switch on the front, two BNC's on the back and a big ribbon cable crudely cut off.
See attached pictures. It would be interesting to figure out what it's supposed to do.
Here's what I know:
- It has two input channels, going through the OP07 op amps on top of the perfboard, and two bnc's just heat shrunk to nothing, likely from test setups.
- The BNC's are just labeled (with pencil) (top-bottom) 0,1,2,3, trig. Last one has no ID. The toggle switches between pos/neg.
- Two BNCs on the back are labeled bit 0, bit 1
-The 74LS320 clock generator is driven by a 10 MHz crystal, and feeds LS592 timer, whose preset bits are fed to the ribbon connector.
-Two of the voltage regs (78/7915) aren't used ? PSU in is +-12V and is regulated to 5V for the logic
It looks a little incomplete but again, this was a working instrument, as far as I know, not some leftover from a university project, so it must be assumed the module preformed some task in its current state. Since this is a energy spectrometer (probably) it would make sense if there was some sort of ADC involved.
Could this be some sort of crude, discrete delta/sigma ADC?
I don't think getting the module working is an option, but it would be interesting to know what's going on.
I hope you think so too!
--Chris