Quindar Tones

en.wikipedia.org

14 points·Amorymeltzer··5 comments

> a means by which remote transmitters on Earth were turned on and off

This sentence was real confusing. The transmitters were turned on and off by the people on Earth, but they were remote transmitters _on other parts of Earth_, not turned on and off remotely by the astronauts. The astronauts weren't turning Earth's transmitters on or off. Right?

I didn't know what a Capsule Communicator was, I thought it was a piece of equipment used by astronauts in their space capsule. But it's a role if the ground crew; the person who is responsible for communicating with the astronauts.

Knowing that, the article makes more sense. Mission control has to send audio to transmit and also turn the transmitters on and off. They do that all in one data line (phone line) using these tones.

Love these sounds in Kerbal, actually made a package that adds a few to Chatterer.

Fun fact: when the Quindar tones were no longer needed, NASA initially removed them. However, it caused confusion in mission control since everyone was used to them, so NASA added them back.

This is one of the many things Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 film depicted correctly, as opposed to how the tones were simulated on quite a few other TV shows and films about that era of space flight. For example, some of the more egregious depictions had the tones coming from astronaut transmissions, not the ground transmissions. Knowing this would have been a simple matter of research, but a lot of folks apparently didn’t do it.

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