E-mail Received,
Dale Lamm writes in his email;
Those are Dage 520's. They were mono Vidicon cameras. This is confirmed
by 7735 tube type numbers in one of your pix. My understanding is that
Dage equipment was popular with educational institutions. The company
I once worked for (both a UHF broadcaster and an equipment dealer) sold
Dage and other brands to colleges. We even used a pair of them on our
B & W remote unit, along with a Dynair switcher, Riker sync gen and
RCA TR-5 quad. Back in 1970, this wasn't too bad a setup for a small town
station. The color truck had PC-70's.
That big connector has been around at least since the days of a TK-11
camera. Nearly every domestic camera maker with split camera-CCU used
it. In the color realm, it was TV-81 and TV-85 nomenclature, IIRC. The
CCU's you seek are just 2RU tall. Dage could take a zoom lens, as your
pix show. We only had one of those, the second 520 used C-mount fixed
lenses.
520's weren't too heavy. One person could place them on a Hercules tripod
easily. Being Vidicon, they were almost unusable doing night high-school
football games at your typical 1970's era stadium. Pretty much a daytime
camera. I am still amazed that our sales department could line up any
sponsors for some of the horrible quality tape we dragged back to the
studio after shooting a Friday night football game. Towards the end of
their life at our station, the best 520 got to be the scoreboard camera
in the color truck. Hardly a glorious end to one's career.
To a kid of 17 working his first job in broadcasting, a 520 was a magnificent
triumph of engineering, exceeded only by a quad tape machine.
Dale