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I'm 24 and started with 30's-60's era radios back around when I was 10. I bought my first tube TV when I was roughly 14 (the thing was a 'dog' of a set and only got to the point of working decently yesterday), and kept buying monochrome sets....Eventually I had a working (on original parts) one, and by junior year of high school I managed to fight through my first successful TV restoration. Up until my first year of college most of my knowledge was what I'd learned on tube radios and read in period repair books, etc, then my college gave me a laptop and forum reading built significantly on that knowledge (mostly in the troubleshooting area). I believe it was late in that first year of college that I restored my first color set (a Silvertone CTC-15 clone), that set alone taught me a LOT about troubleshooting.
I'd recommend if you want an early color set (after learning on radios and monochrome sets) to look for a CTC-4 or CTC-7 and ignore the CTC-5 entirely. RCA tended to start with over engineered overpriced sets in any category and cheapen them up.....Since RCA was selling color at a loss to try to build the market the cheapening was precipitous. The CTC-4 was a sensible simplification from the CTC-2, and a good first 'from scratch' 21" color set chassis, but the CTC-5 was RCA hitting bottom in terms engineering cheapness....It was a poor design that often struggled to produce 18KV of high voltage when the (known to be somewhat dim when driven to spec) CRT it drove expected about 25KV give or take about 2KV. The CTC-5 had issues with blooming (HV becoming loaded down by picture, and raster changing size, accompanied by loss of focus), problems with brightness and contrast interacting (worse on some versions) such that it was hard to set them, etc.
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