Digital data-acquisition system for use with a proton-precession base-station magnetometer

At UCLA the base station magnetometer is a Scintrex MB-2 which uses a two inch wide chart record scaled to 100 nT. The magnetometer is also equipped with a digital readout. A block diagram of the data acquisition system is presented. The microcomputer utilizes a R6502 as the central processor. Data are entered into the computer via a 12 key keypad and are displayed on a 6 digit liquid crystal display. Data from the Scintrex base magnetometer is passed to the microcomputer via a 37 line connector. One line of this connector is used to signal the status of the internally controlled sampling circuit in the base station magnetometer. Digital data are stored temporarily in random access memory until an output buffer is filled. When this occurs power is applied to the audio cassette tape transport mechanism and after a short delay a block of data is written onto tape. The tape interface implements the Kansas City standard which is nearly universally used for microcomputer recording on audio cassette recorders.