So the console actually has two sides, one built out of vintage 60s/70s/80s American computing and interface technology and another out of Soviet. The American side is going to handle calculating the satellite's relative position to the station, and the Soviet side is going to handle tuning the radio for doppler shift and antenna positioning. As alluded to in an earlier post, the American side is going to use INMOS transputers, while the Soviet side is going to use a hand-built computer based upon the KM1810VM88, a Soviet clone of our well-known Intel 8088.

I recently settled on numeral displays for American side of the retro satellite tracker console: the Sperry/Beckman SP-353. It's a gas-discharge display that was developed in 1971 as an improvement upon nixie tubes and sports numerals 0.55" tall. Kind of a pain to drive, but definitely suits the overall aesthetic. I did consider using nixies, but I'm kind of sick of seeing them everywhere!

On the Soviet side, I'm going to use IV-22 VFDs. They're actually somewhat similar to the SP-353s in driver requirements.

Combining these with assorted American and Soviet indicator lamps and buttons on each side should make for a pretty neat looking result. Finally found some proper Tellite switches for the American side of the console, more on that to come. Still researching what's appropriate for the Soviet side.

Also still trying to decide whether to interface the displays and switches directly to the vintage calculating hardware for each side or use modern hardware as drivers to simplify the interface requirements. I think it may be reasonable to directly interface the transputers with some C012 link chips, but it's really tempting to use an XMOS on the Soviet side to handle all the displays and switches. Decisions, decisions.