Finally an update. I don't tend to update much, but since my last one I have been lucky and acquired some pretty sought after and valuable Trinitron portable sets.
While I was out West in Portland, Oregon I met up with another member and purchased his KV4100. Pretty cool set; Everything on this thing works perfectly and it's in astonishingly nice shape. I messed with this TV a lot while I was in Portland. I also learned that the TSA doesn't care if you stuff one of these in your carry on bags. They asked to see it, and even commented on it being really cool and old fashioned looking. My favorite souvenir from by far the nicest vacation I have had away from home in all my life.
While I was out in Portland, I also checked out some of their Goodwill stores, and landed some nifty pieces, one of them being an Insignia DTV Converter box, the older metal shell version, with remote for $14.99. (It was also labeled Zenith) I am not sure who makes it, but it's fairly well made and very sensitive. It's easy to use and has a lot of features. It picks up over 70 channels here in Lake Geneva perfectly fine. I feed it though my agile modulator and can watch TV like normal now.
When I got back home, I had set up with a friend to meet WISCOJIM in up state Wisconsin to pick up my purchase, and I finally landed a KV5200! But the deal was just to sweet, I ended up with TWO KV5200 sets. I was able to repair the tuner issue with the "sick" set the same day I got it home. The one with the sick tuner turned out to be an incredibly low hours set. Really nice to own one of these in such fantastic health.
And just today, I finally scored a KV5000! I was really surprised at his condition when it got here. It's not heavily used, and it has the best picture I have seen from a TV that was built in 1973. Thanks to Electronic M for donating me a package of parts from a gutted KV5000, I was able to really make this set shine. The face plate I got from him looked cleaner and had more shine, as did the tinted glass cover, so I swapped them both around. I also polished up the knobs from his parts set, and installed them on mine. Thanks for the stuff, M! it really shined this little gem up.
My collection is largely Sony now, just as I wanted it to be. All the sets on display are all high quality Japanese sets.
So the only set I am missing that I care about is the KV5300 now. I'm thinking about a KV4000 to go with my KV4100, and a KX series, but those command pretty hefty prices when they appear.
And I am also in the process of developing a mobile media transmitter for my portables. There is no more analog signal left worth watchin, and these only work as far as my agile modulator can reach, so I came up with a way to make them work on the go, allowing them to be fully mobile and useable once again with out being confined to the need for a plug for a converter, or restricted to the distance of my modulator. I have the box half built already, I am just waiting on the micro media player to come. it puts out AV, which I will then just feed in to a small modulator that I disassembled, which runs on 12V 100mA, same as the mobile media player. Just load a bunch of old TV on it and I can use it anywhere. The box will run on a single 12V 2Ah sealed lead acid.
Both the modulator and media player are very small, the mobile transmitter will be about the size of the FD40 watchman, but a hair smaller.