Strange Coin operated 5" set
 

http://cgi.ebay.com/VINTAGE-60s-COIN...QQcmdZViewItem

Never saw one of these before. Where would you have seen a set like this? talk about pay tv :scratch2:

It is newer than that, probably from around 1980. Greyhound bus stations were always big on coin-operated TV sets; if you remember the desks in schools with the chair and desktop combined in one piece, imagine that with a TV where the desktop would have been, more or less.

As "recently" as 1985, I installed video display equipment (arrival/departure displays) in the new Portland, Oregon Greyhound station, and they were putting in new coin-op TV set seats then as well. They were not like the Ebay one, though; more like 9" or 12", and maybe even color by then.

I fondly remember feeding quarters to one in the St.Paul Greyhound depot at dawn just before Christmas 1971. It had an old rotary-switch tuner and no UHF.All there was to watch was test patterns.

Back in '74, I sat in a Greyhound in Kansas City, MO all night long waiting for the connecting bus to show @ 6 am. Plugged change into one of those things for hours out of boredom.

There used to be a restaurant near where I lived growing up in Camarillo, CA that had coin-op TV's that looked very similar to that one on ebay.

David

I remember similar sets at the Tri-Cities Airport when I was perhaps 8 years old. This would have been around 1990. I remember being thrilled when my grandmother gave me quarters so I could watch TV while waiting for Cousin Julie's plane to land.

They still had rotary tuners, and I don't recall being able to receive UHF, though I may have been able to do so. It was b&w, which I was used to, and I don't recall watching anything I enjoyed. I likely watched local gospel programs, such as "The Campbell Gospel Hour," sponsored by Campbell Ford, a long-gone Ford dealership.

The fact that I could insert a coin and watch television pleased me at the time, despite the fact that I couldn't watch anything I liked.

None of those coin-operated TV locations ever had UHF tuning available, most likely. They would have got their signals from an on-site MATV ("micro-cable-tv") installation that probably used cables that were not much good at UHF frequencies. At best, there would have been a few channel converters to change the local UHF stations to unused VHF channels, as is or was done on analog cable-TV systems in general. The same kind of setups you would see in hospitals, hotels, etc. before they started getting connected to city cable-TV systems.