On Thursday, October 15, 2020 at 2:13:24 AM UTC-4, Cydrome Leader wrote:
John-Del wrote:
On Monday, October 12, 2020 at 1:10:53 PM UTC-4, Chuck wrote:
On Mon, 12 Oct 2020 12:51:58 -0000 (UTC), wrote:
Cydrome Leader wrote:
Just have been an "honest" mistake. Any idea where they rebuilt all those
modules you had to swap? I kind of liked their 70s console TVs with the
weird plastic pedastal and the preposterous "zoom" button.
Pffft. Foggy memories of that stuff.
I think, when I decided to look at the sound problem I went over to that
place on Bryn Mawr just west of Kimball, North Central. They used to be
authorized Zenith, RCA, Magnavox and some others distributors.
I ordered the service manual and when it came in I remember the guy behind
the counter said I wasn't going to like it. Not sure if it was from Zenith
or the Sams copy but it basically was a single "road map", folded out to
like a 3'x4' paper that was more or less just a block diagram of the set.
Very few voltage reading points and or waveforms. Most of it was covered in
"gray areas" and he said if you think the problem was in one of those areas,
Zenith wanted the whole module back for diagnostics.
So I'm assuming at least through the mid 90's all the defective modules went
back to them.
Later on, after LG took them over and Phillips took over RCA, there was a
mail order place to get modules in Indiana, pretty sure they were called
PTS, a place that used to repair detent (mechanical) vhf/uhf tuners. After
those became extinct, they went into the module repair/replacement business.
Pretty sure PTS stood for Precision Tuner Service but after a quick google,
they don't seem to be around anymore or have a historical mention.
Might of been PTC, like I said, foggy memory of all that now.
Anyway, with those Digital System III's (or whatever they were called),
Zenith never wanted board level repairs on them. Just module exchanges.
-bruce
It was PTS. At one point, they had offices in most major US cities.
Thomson bought RCA, not Phillips.
Also, PTS started out as Precision Tuner Service. There were a dozen or more similar companies in the U.S., like Castle Tuner Service. They started out servicing mechanical tuners, then electronic tuners, then expanded to TV modules. PTS still exists as a recycler that sells used boards: https://www.ptselectronicsinc.com/
What's involved in the rebuild of a manual tuner? A spray of tuner cleaner
or something like that was all I ever did the few times I came across one..
A marginal mechanical tuner used to work find on a cable box or even a broad spectrum manual cable system. Back when everything was on antenna, the tuner was critical to performance of the TV, but when fed with a strong signal, cable, RF modulator, less so.
Better rebuilders would dip-clean the chassis, replace the wafer switches if bad, replace any bad parts inside (really tight for room on the incremental types), clean and lube the contacts, and align them. Later, they replaced transistors when the tuners went SS. Honestly, for $7.95 U.S., it wasn't worth screwing with them. They would come back rock solid and aligned. Towards the end of the mechanical tuner era, they were still less than $20 to get rebuilt.