Automotive High-Density Digital Tape Recording System

A high-packing-density digital tape recorder has been developed for long-term mobile recording of low-frequency analog input data. The recorder operates unattended directly from the car battery and offers significant advantages over conventional FM instrumentation tape recorders in size, power, weight, channel count, and record time.

A separate playback unit enters the digital data directly into a computer for analysis, and provides an analog reconstruct of any one of the input channels for graphic analysis.

The recording system is discussed with the aid of a functional block diagram, and samples of reconstructed data from actual road tests are presented to illustrate the performance of the recorder in a severe shock and vibration environment.