[kf4rca]

Have you ever heard of Cartrivision? (see atached)
Ask me anything you want about VPR80. Our station had 6.
All type C tapes are interchangeable. Besides Ampex, Sony, RCA, Hitachi also made a type C machine. The Hitachi needed external compressed air (like quads).
When I got back from Ampex school, two other stations in the market were having problems with theirs.
WPBA TV30 (PBS station) had an open 10K resistor in the drum servo, keeping it from spinning up.
The Weather Channel's machine had a blown TL084 op amp in the reel servo.
WPBA was a disaster of a TV station. One of the tasks of the engineering dept. was to put out plastic trash cans in the control room whenever it rained.(I am not making this up!)
The lady GM wanted to pay me for the repair job but I told her to put it toward the roof! The station was known as the Dirty 30 because of the dust bunnies located in the bottom of the racks!
I got a really nice Weather Channel mug for their repair job.
Both of those stations had engineering depts. but I don't think they were component level.