WTF is this card?!

I have NO idea what this is.

Gallery of shots:
http://img51.imageshack.us/gal.php?g=p1010424j.jpg

It was found in a 486 system with a 486DX2 and a socket for a P23T (pentium overdrive) or 487SX in addition to the normal socket, which was pre-socket-3. (bios 1994)

Edit:

My best leads are as such:
- It could be a card for controlling Weather Surveillance Radar (WSR) or using radio signals for WSR.
- It could be an analog-to-digital converter for use with... something..

Edit 2:
- Adds an extension to the instruction set of the CPU (found WSR acronym with mentions of ISA cards in a patent)

Edit 3: I checked out the two motorola chips, one is a hex inverter (nothing telling there), and the other is a phase locked loop frequency synthesizer (damn is that a mouthful)... these are used in radios and other... signalish things... this particular one is a parallel input one, so it takes more than one signal, and makes a differential signal out of it... that might actually be all that this thing does - it has a db9 connector, could be input, and a... whatever you call it, which could be delta output..

Edit 4: it has an SRAM controller...

Edit 5: one of the chips is a 4th order switched capacitor, which apparently is used for lopping part of a signal off.

It seems to be a satellite weather receiver, or more specifically, for digitizing the images from weather satellites to create weather maps and such.

Interesting piece of kit, but probably not particularly useful.

If I knew the pinout for the db9 connector it might be quite useful.. I could stick what I assume is the out into a RF modulator or a composite monitor and hook the other thing up to a dish and maybe get my own private weather radar, rofl. Either way this is a neat card if that is what it is.

Since we both drew that as a possible conclusion I'll roll with it for now, but if anyone else has an idea, let me know.

Since we both drew that as a possible conclusion I'll roll with it for now

Click to expand...

Actually, I worded my previous post badly... I should have said it seems to be part of a satellite weather receiver.

FWIW, I came to that conclusion after running across an article from the early '90s mentioning the WSR-524 in taking satellite imaging from... Antarctica, or somewhere. I'm having trouble finding it again, otherwise I'd link to it.

I got the impression that number denotes a whole system, and what you have is just the piece that interfaces the rest of the stuff with the PC for display and data collection. I couldn't determine what all the pieces of the system were, but if I had to guess, I'd say that card by itself is probably just a pretty basic analog interface board, just with god-knows-what kind of pinout and timing setup to match up with the rest of the equipment that went with it.

Ah, yeah that makes more sense. Perhaps somebody at a weather place someplace needs one and I can sell it to them someday.