CT-100 as shipped from RCA
 

My CT-100 service manual (1st edition) says the 15GP was shipped in a separate carton. Seems somewhere else I read they were shipped complete. Do any of you know for sure?
Phil

Is that manual available online anywhere?

Regards,

Phil Nelson

Consensus is -- based upon that manual -- that Merrills were initially shipped sans CRT, but the practice was halted early.

Pete

I found that the easy way to tell whether any particular CT-100 was shipped partly assembled, is to look carefully at the bottom structure of the cabinet. The yoke and CRT mounting hardware was in a separate crate, and bolted inside the bottom of the cabinet in those sets. If there are bolt marks and recessed nuts in the holes in the bottom crossmembers, it was not assembled. If there are only clean drilled holes, it was shipped with the tube in-situ.

Charles

Is convergence easy to do on these sets? I don't think RCA would want to risk the quality issues stemming from badly done convergence done by novices in the field. As the CT100 was one of the first color sets released to the world, the average TV serviceman would be a novice to convergence.

I could see RCA shipping CRTs with yokes already mounted on them, and with the convergence circuitry connected up to it, as a single package. With the convergence adjustments already done at the factory. and in the field: "mount this board here, and connect these connectors here".

I doubt the jr. level tech would have been the one installing this at the customer's house. With how high the initial price was, and how much prestige would have been associated with owning the first color set I would think the installer would have sent their best.

-J

I'd love to see a copy of this manual. Does it have anything else that is additional/different from the 1954 RCA Television Field Service Manual reproduced in my CT-100 article? If so, it could be a useful document to share.

Regards,

Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html

I don't think that the CRT installation was left until the set arrived at the customer's house.
I remember when the first color TV arrived in our town. Word quickly spread that the RCA dealer had a COLOR TV! I went to the shop with my father, and for sure they had one! Since the shop in the back was pretty small, they had roped off an area on the sales floor to unpack and assemble the set. Indeed the set was face-down on a heavy furniture pad with no tube and no top. My father asked why they were replacing the tube in a brand new set, and we were told that it was shipped that way because color tubes were more fragile than B/W tubes.
It seemed like it took them weeks to get the set operating properly (but, then what is the time scale to an impatient little kid). I remember that they used a pattern generator that looked "unfinished" in that the tubes were visible when they were using it.
jr

My guess is that the dealer put the tube in if necessary, then went through alignment for practice even if the tube had been installed at the factory. Then, if I were a customer paying that much, I would appreciate getting the complete tech show at home as the set was adjusted a third time. A savvy tech, after impressing the new owner with the complexity, would also make it clear that he stood ready to return and fix any problems, and maybe hint that those might occur often enough to make a service contract a very good idea.

Every time you moved one of these sets, the convergence was out anyway, so much better the service tech had practiced in his shop before he had to do it in the customer's house.


I strongly suspect that RCA had production problems with getting enough CRTs made to meet the promised delivery date. The big lump of a TV set had to ship via freight, while the smaller CRT could travel much faster.


Legend has it that the 15 inch color CRT early production had more rejects than good tubes. As soon as RCA had the larger CRTs in production, no more 15 inchers were built and these early rejects were used to fulfill the 7 year requirement for replacement parts.

James.

Yeah, several of the first Bar - Dot generators, especially the ones made by B&K were in a black suitcase, and when you opened suitcase to use it, the chassis inside was topless. It had more tubes in it than the average B&W TV!

The first shop in Atlanta that I worked in had one of these and the running joke was they made it this way so it would be easier to change the tubes. We spent more time working on that pile of junk than using it. Tube counting circuits get real problematic if the tubes get bounced about while doing service calls.

It was replaced with tiny solid state battery operated unit in 1959 and that unit was trouble free unless someone forgot to turn it off and the next day the battery would be kaput. At the time the battery was a non-standard battery, which was only stocked by the manufactuer.

Jas.

My Riders manual has the original CT100 service manual that shows the CRT was shipped separately. I wasn't surprised, as RCA used to do that with their early B&W sets. Didn't RCA service company maintain those sets the first year, no matter who sold them.

Considering that the earlier color sets did not have automatic degaussing and that the sets were very susceptible to convergence and purity changes when just moving the sets across the room or even rotating them on axis, the installation of the CRT on site makes sense.

Terry

If you think the CT100 setup was bad try to set up the TK-40/41 cameras for same set.

A survivor tech from the era told me that the cams had to be oriented magnetically north/south for initial registration and setup.

It was a wonder that color made it home.

That seems like an urban myth to me. I worked with the TK-41's back in the 60's & early 70's. This includes KTLA receiving one of the last of the TK-41C's in 1966. I don't recall that anyone ever cared what direction the camera was pointed in during registration and set up. These were quality, well built cameras, very durable in studio and on remotes. They always produced a damn good color picture.

-Steve D.

CT-100 Service manual
 

Phil Nelson,
I have an original that I could scan for you if you are still looking.
Phil

Much appreciated. I'll send you a PM.

Phil Nelson

Reeferman, If your original is different from the one at

http://www.earlytelevision.org/images/ct_100_manual.pdf

I'm sure a lot more of us would like to see a copy.

James.

The manual at ETF appears to be the same as the 1954 service manual data, which you can also find at http://antiqueradio.org/RCACT-100TelevisionDesign.htm .

Reeferman agreed to scan his manual and email it to me. If it is something different than the field service material, I can publish it with other materials listed in my article.

Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html

You need to separate the CT-100 from the 21 inch sets that followed in terms of difficulty of convergence. The CT-100 had very few adjustments and convergence is easy to do. Of course the tube only produces a 12 inch picture, so errors aren't as visible.

CT-100 service manual
 

Phil,
Here is the cover of the 40 page document. Had to do B&W for size requirements. Sent you a reply to the antique radio address. Let me know.
Phil

Steve, thanks for the information! I was unaware of that, as these sets were out of use when I started servicing color.

The first shipment, in 1954, of the CT-100s to Western Tennessee was only five sets.

Two of these five sets went to WMCT, the NBC affiliate in Memphis, one set to the home of a senior executive at the station, the fourth set to a Memphis doctor, and the fifth set was purchased by the owner of a TV repair shop 80 miles north of the station, where four month later, I started working repairing radios, cleaning the shop and general odd jobs and slowly graduated to B&W TVs.

Although the CT-100 was purchased through the Memphis distributor, the south bound freight truck actually left his set at his shop the day before the other four were delivered to the Memphis distributor.

When shop owner called about the RCA tech who was supposed to come out to set the set up, he was told he would be up in about two weeks. Since my impatient future boss had owned and operated his shop for 30 years and he had taken the RCA color training course, he said that he would set the set up himself!

Now, this was a statement that he quickly came to regret, as he was never able to get the set working. It turned out that something had jarred loose in the CRT during shipping and the resulting short took out some other components in the set. It was about a month and two trips by the RCA tech before he ever saw a full color image on it. He was never willing to talk about that humbling experience. He kept the set in his shop and used it as a display curiosity, sometimes turning it on to impress a customer. He would not let anyone else in the shop touch that set.

I moved to Atlanta in the spring of 1959 and there my experience on color TV was limited to the few remaining CBS 205's that the other repairmen hated and Admiral 1956-58 models. The Atlanta shop had a contract with a store that purchased a warehouse with 137 mostly non-operational Admiral dealer returns. The store contracted with us for the labor to repair them, with Admiral giving a 30 day parts-only warranty starting with the sale date.

The store kinda forgot to tell their customers that they were buying old used TVs. I switched careers and retired from TV servicing in late 1960, and never looked back. Since then, I've only repaired my own sets and a few for my friends.

James.

A color CRT does have some issues with the earth's magnetic field but nothing that can't be solved with a tech with experience. However, I have never heard of and never experienced any problems with that issue with any color camera. That's a (technicians') wives tale. A properly set up TK41 delivered great color in any position. For that matter, if it were true it would also bother B&W cameras because they used the same basic circuits, pickup tubes and magnetism doesn't bother the color dichroic lens assembly.

The image orthicons are mounted in a metal tube, which I'd guess acts as a magnetic shield, sufficient for protection from the Earth's field, but not necessarily from man-made fields. The Ed Sullivan theater in NY backed up to a subway transformer station (maybe still does) which caused problems if cameras were too close to the back wall. This was still the case in the early 90s when we shot the first US HDTV tests there on tube cameras (Saticons). Don't know if the substation is still there, but CCD cameras make it a moot point for the Letterman show that is staged there.

NYC Rotary Converter
 

You are talking about a well and overdone subject about a rotary converter near the theater. Rotary converters are no longer used but are still in place. Although I have seen no evidence of that effect, this is an extreme circumstance that would bother anything.

We were talking about the earth's magnetic field, and NOT extreme man made circumstances like that.

As far as the Letterman Theater is concerned, the threat was never much of a problem:

"When the Ed Sullivan Theater was built next door to IRT Substation #13, Lobenstein said CBS made a deal with the IRT; since the extreme radio-frequency energy emitted by the station would make the network’s cameras behave oddly, the IRT agreed to shut down the substation each Sunday evening while Sullivan’s show was broadcast. After CBS moved David Letterman’s show there in 1993, the network inquired about the possibility of doing the same thing for Letterman’s nightly tapings. The MTA balked that time around, since shutting down a working substation each weekday in the middle of the evening rush hour wouldn’t have worked as well. CBS wound up surrounding the entire Letterman stage in a Faraday cage of quarter-inch plate steel to block the RF emissions. The rotary converters were finally de-energized in December 1999, when they were replaced by new solid-state rectifiers, which are much smaller, quieter, cooler, and easier to maintain."

I agree, and I think that's what I said.

Julian, You do recall the content of previous posts before you post? You also repeated my comments on post #15 re: the TK-40-41 color camera setup. Just checking.

-Steve D.

Sorry Steve,

I do type alot and just slipped my mind. I was looking under "Rotary Converters" and there was that paragraph with no reference. I was making a reference that the Sullivan Theater was not bothered much after they worked out a solution. Someone started this thread saying that the color cameras were affected by the earth's magnetic field for which they are not really bothered (practical sense) if any and they got off on that tangent about the rotary converter house off Broadway in NYC which has nothing to do with the earth's field, an isolated incident.

I scanned the RCA CTC2 manual loaned by reeferman and added it to the reference portion of my CT-100 design article:

http://antiqueradio.org/RCACT-100TelevisionDesign.htm

Here's a direct link to the 16-megabyte manual:

http://antiqueradio.org/art/RCA_CTC2...ce_Data_T3.pdf

Sure enough, this manual tells the dealer how to install the 15GP22 CRT, which was shipped in a separate carton. As Charles noted, another carton in the lower cabinet space contained the yoke, purity coil, & whatnot.

This 40-page manual has more content than the shorter RCA Field Service Manual section for the CT-100. I haven't yet compared the two to look for little differences in material that's duplicated (the schematic, for instance).

Thanks, reeferman. I'll send the original back in a day or two.

Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html

Phil
You are welcome.
Phil

Thank you both for supplying and posting that manual.

Ahhh! Ran out of ink trying to print it! lol

Don't ya just hate when that happens. And of course new ink will cost a fortune.

Thank you very much for taking the time to scan that document. I don't have one of those televisions. But I sure would love to own one. I just like to see how it was done "In the day". Glad that there are some of us who still preserve this piece of electronic history.

On page 9, the crt diagram on the right hand side of the page should be rotated 180 degrees. Hopefully, the tech did not use this diagram for assembly.