Wonderful score today
 

A friend went to a estate sale yesterday and sent out an email afterward to everyone in our club that there was "an old TV with a 3-inch screen in rough shape" there if anyone was interested. It was only a few miles from my house, so figuring that I could always use another Pilot set or postwar TV-school kit set if the price was right, I took a ride over. I got there several hours after the start of the last day of the sale and the place was looking pretty picked over.

:eek: Instead of a Pilot I found this Andrea 1-F-5:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7350/1...06304cda01.jpg

If I had seen this last week, it might have caused me to have a heart attack! Fortunately this week I was prepared for my heart to be pounding in my ears as I went back upstairs to negotiate a price.

New Jersey may have it's faults (Bridgegate anyone?) but it continues to be possible to trip over fabulous old TVs here.

-- Dave Sica

Nice. Show us some more pictures.

Carl

Wow! I haven't seen a prewar set in the wild since the late 70's. I often wonder how many such sets are sitting in basements, attics and barns just waiting to be found.

Incredible find :banana: I would flip out for sure if I came across one.

This is all I've got right now (it's still living in my car):

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3752/1...cddebebaa1.jpg

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7409/1...f6a2dc8cab.jpg

THAT is...wow, incredible! Congratulations!

Congratulations, Great way to start 2014!

Wow, what a find. I guess that's got one of those bang, you're dead high voltage supplies?

There's good info on your set including a schematic here: http://bs.cyty.com/menschen/e-etzold...andrea/1f5.htm

Holy cow!...That puts a lot of dreams of major finds back in my head.

Congrats on your find!

What kind of future do you have planned for it?

Awesome!:thmbsp:

Another amazing find. On the ARF someone posted on finding a '39 RCA TT5! it proves incredible finds are still not impossible.
ETF says less than 25 have been accounted for. It's a must for this set to carefully and professionally restored. It is totally worth the investment. You have a set that is worth $5,000-$10,000. You struck gold!
It will be so great to see this set be brought back to this:
http://bs.cyty.com/menschen/e-etzold...Andrea1F5a.jpg

Yeah, I actually had to look it up because I wasn't sure but it's a 60-cycle "brute force" high voltage supply. It's "only" 2,500 volts but at 60 Hz, I hear that should be more than enough to kill you. Even the DC high voltage with what looks on the schematic like it should have a fair amount of current available behind it wouldn't be something I'd want to tangle with.

Great find :thmbsp:. Seeing a prewar "in the wild" sure takes your breath away on the first glance doesn't it? Seeing one with a $75 price tag is pretty nice too.

I'm glad that set went to Dave because he's a good guy and will put it to good use.

It's weird how treasures like this come to light. This sale was in an affluent area and the only advertisement was on estatesales.net. The ad listed, among other things, amateur radio equipment. There were no pictures and no mention of an antique TV.

I was there early on the first day of the sale. From the odds and ends in the basement, you could see that the owner was a ham and a tinkerer but it appears that the stuff had been cherry-picked before the sale. For example, the only SW or ham receiver on the premises was a rusty old Coast Guard VLF receiver from WWII. There was a transmitter but it was home-brew, seven feet high and weighed a ton. I can't imagine how you could remove that monster. (I would have loved to have the rack that the transmitter was mounted in because I could have fit at least a half-dozen boatanchors in it!)

There wasn't a lot of super-old stuff in the rest of the house so it doesn't appear that the home owner had been the original owner of that pre-war TV. It would be interesting to know how he came to own it. Just to add to the weirdness of the entire scene, this guy also owned a huge modern flat-screen TV. He had audio equipment, too, but it was Realistic stuff, not high-end stuff.

By the way, this article states that only 17 of the Andrea 1F5 sets are known to have survived. I guess Dave's is No. 18.

http://bs.cyty.com/menschen/e-etzold...andrea/1f5.htm

Joe Connor

Homina ! Homina ! Homina ! (grin)

I've often daydreamed of stumbling upon some electronics engineer who had retired down this way and still had a set like that tucked away in a corner. That's one of those finds where you can't grab the old wallet fast enough!

Amazing score!!!! I too have the dream of walking into a garage sale with an old prewar TV tucked away in the corner. I would have to bite my lip til it bled from keeping my smile from giving it away!!

Wow, Dave. What a way to start the Happy New Year. :thmbsp:

Wow, the score of a lifetime. Congratulations!

I guess there are still a few cool things to be found "in the wild."

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

Congratulations, Dave. Nice find. It even has its 5AP4, which might still be good.

We have accounted for 23 factory made sets, plus 11 of the kit models, which use a very similar chassis:

http://www.earlytelevision.org/database_prewar.html

About 15 prewar sets become known to us every year:

http://www.earlytelevision.org/sets_added.html

Some of these have been in the hands of collectors for years and have just been reported to us, but most are new finds, such as Dave's.

WOW! WOW! WOW! Is all I can say! What a find.

Wow. First one of these I've seen. Be sure to post pictures as you get into it. You just never know what you're going to find under some rocks these days!

Congratulations from Germany!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
All I can say: God loves you!!!!!!!!!:yes:

TV-collector :stupid:

I didn't notice before the 6V6 video amplifier which means it's an early-production set. Even better. :)

Congratulations David.

Seems the new year is bringing much good news to you.
Outstanding find.

-Steve D.

Looks like it was built for AM sound. If so, and if you get it restored and working, you could customize an RF modulator to produce AM modulated sound instead of FM. Most RF modulator chips have a separate video modulator and FM sound modulator. You'd need to provide a trap in the video signal to remove energy at 4.5MHz, so it doesn't contaminate the spectrum where the AM sound will be found once the video is modulated onto the RF video carrier. And you'd need to build an AM modulator at the sound carrier frequency.

Far from absolutely necessary, as the success of slope detection with the unmodified restored sets at the ETF has proven.

Steve,

Yes it is. I think maybe I should go out an buy a lottery ticket right now!

-- Dave

WA2ISE: that would probably be beyond my "shade-tree engineer" capabilities, although I'm certain all of you guys could and would talk me through such a project.

I'm currently discussing the merits of restoring such a set vs. just leaving it in original condition with a fellow collector. I wonder if anyone wants to jump in on that discussion? Maybe it would be appropriate to start a new thread for that.

-- Dave

Prewar sets with AM detectors work just fine with a standard RF modulator using slope detection. That is how we operate them at the museum.

Congratulations Dave! These sets are relatively easy to restore and perform well.


Dave,
The problem I've run into with slope detection, while it does work it requires the audio carrier to be centered right on the slope, meaning any slight drift in the LO and the audio moves off the slope and drops out. The RCA LO design seems to be a bit more stable than the GE, but they require constant touching up of the fine tuning the entire time you run them. The other problem is modern modulators set the audio carrier -16dB from the video whereas it was originally set to -6dB.
I've given up on slope detection since my converters are capable of AM and FM audio modulation and variable carrier level. Driving these sets with a -6dB AM signal is night and day from using slope detection. As a bonus I program the converter for 441 line and the original carrier frequencies not that this is required.

Darryl

Edit:
Steve,
You posted your reply while I was writing mine. How much drift do you notice in the sets, especially the GE's when operating them? What I found was I had to constantly touch up the fine tuning to keep the audio on the slope. With AM modulation and the fine tuning having such a limited range on these sets, it pretty much doesn't matter and the sound always comes through strong with less distortion.

Darryl,

I find the Andrea and RCA sets are fairly stable.

You are right about the aural carrier being -16 db relative to the visual. That means you have to hit the sets with a lot of RF to get good audio level. I typically hit them with about +25 dBmv.

Of course one of your modulators with AM audio would be a much better solution.

Steve,
That's definitely a higher RF level than I was using which probably accounts for the difference. I'll have to check that out in May.

Darryl

Regarding restore vs. keep as-is, if the crt is good (or a good one can be obtained) I would do a very careful restoration including neat restuffing of the caps, etc. Just speaking for myself, if I couldn't use it, I wouldn't care to own it.

Almost five years after the fact I guess I'm still not used to the obsolescence of NTSC and the reality that all analog sets require some kind of converter now. And yet I did deliberately use past tense because I wasn't certain that the museum was still running the prewar sets with an ordinary modulator rather than one of your converters.

For the two Steve's, there are minor differences noted between apparent factory schematic at

http://earlytelevision.org/tv_schematic_diagrams.html

and the Rider one at

http://bs.cyty.com/menschen/e-etzold...andrea/1f5.htm

with the first one seemingly the older version of the set.

My thoughts when seeing Dave S's first post yesterday was the thread was going to quickly turn to speculation on whether or not that this set had been converted to NTSC picture standards, or was out of service by 1941. Now that we are up to post 37, I'll just casually mention this question.

441 or 525? How many installed channels does the tuner have?

Oh, and Steve S, congratulations on the find and I can hear that set screaming, "Get me out of the car!!!"

Jas.

Dave, when you do start your restoration, start a thread and post your
pictures, thoughts, and progress. I think a lot of us would like to follow
with you when you do the restoration.

Carl

James, the only difference between the 441 and 525 line standards is the horizontal scanning frequency, and all the sets have plenty of range on the controls to adjust to either. So no modification is needed.

This set was made for 2+ years and there are several versions. Some used 6V6s and some used 6AG7s as video outputs. Some had 2 channel tuners and some had 3.

Dave's set may be missing its tuner, since the shaft is gone.

There appears to be something in the tuner position, but I won't know for sure what it is until I get to take a closer look.

Had a really nice long talk with Chuck A. last night and he said that in his experience most prewar sets had been converted to the postwar standard, which would make sense. I got the impression that he was talking about more than just tweaking the horizontal oscillator frequency, but maybe not. He also said that (again, in his experience) many prewar sets had new tuners installed at some point soon after the war.

Carl: I promise to document the daylights out of anything done on this set. This set is even more significant than my TRK-120, which is much more of a basket case. I'm currently in the middle of working on a nothing-special radio for a neighbor and I take a lot of pictures even of something like that: http://sdrv.ms/1j3oR0X.

-- Dave