delay lines

[Zero the hero]

I managed to find a couple of glass delay line from an old VCR... any suggestion of use? I don't know anything at all about this kind of component, and I'm wondering if they can be used in standard audio delay.

[Peter Snowberg]

Those little delays are piezoelectric delays which will give you ~10 nanoseconds or even much less so you can't use them for audio at all.

I worked on a big piece of RADAR equipment for a while that used a very similar delay line, except this one was a faceted circle (rather than a rectangle) and it was about a foot in diameter. It was also classified somewhere above 'secret' from it's creation in the late 50s until the mid 70s. The delay time was several milliseconds. I'm guessing it would have worked for a chorus or flanger at least. The same gear also used over 140 tube op-amps.

Sorry to break the bad news.

-Peter

[Zero the hero]

Yeah, you're right. I did a search on google and I found that these components are used in decoding video signals... they give 64 microseconds delay to the signal.
I believe that they're going very quickly into my wastebasket...

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

I saw an 'early technology' radar tower with a MERCURY (in glass) delay line, that stored a whole sweep (which was inverted & subtracted from the next weep, to remove ground clutter). So I guess you could get a half second or so from that one..