Quote:
Originally posted by Charlie
Next to the Motorola was another unique set. This one is a Philco. It's still up there at the shop because we only had room in the van for the Motor, and it's pouring down rain all today. I'll have to get this one home another day. I don't remember the model number, but I did get a couple of photos. I am guessing this one to be a 1965 or 66 model. The cabinet on this one is a little better than the Motorola.
I don't know who made this chassis... it's definitely not an RCA clone. I wish I could have got better pictures of it, but it was really dark in there and crowded. The power transformer looked a bit smaller than what we would normally find in them.
There is a feature on this set that I found to be very unique in a television. This set actually has a fine-tuner indicator like the ones found in Dynaco tuners! On the front above the channel selector, you can see where it says "tuning eye". From the inside, you can see the indicator tube above and forward of the tuner.
I dug through my Sams index to see if I could find a schematic to match up with this set, but my Sams stop at 730. I did find some listings for Philcos in the 1965-66 range, but that goes beyond my folders. There is a 769-3, 827-2, and 835-2. I am thinking that one of these might be the match to this particular roundie. I wish I had written down the model number instead of relying on my memory! If anyone has these folders, could you take a peek to see if any of them match up to what I have in these photos. A sure give-away will be the tuning indicator.
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The tuning eye tube in that Philco is there to assist in setting the fine tuning knob properly. AFC circuits weren't that popular on color sets at the time this one was new; in fact, color TVs from the '50s had no tuner AFC circuits. Many people did not realize that color TV tuning is extremely critical; in fact, when color was first introduced and for some years thereafter (until AFC systems became more or less standard on most sets and, of course, many years before today's quartz-synthesized cable-ready tuners which do not need AFC to keep them on frequency), there were often situations in which a new color set owner would watch an entire program (which was being telecast in color) in black and white (monochrome), unaware that a simple twist of the wrist would have converted the picture to living color. These people were probably accustomed to the rather forgiving nature of b&w TV fine tuning, where one could, more often than not, get away with slight misadjustment and still have a picture plenty good enough to watch. Try this with color TV, however, and you will have anything but a good color picture; in fact, the chances are your picture will have no color at all, even though the monochrome component will be there and may look fairly decent. If you have color in the picture at this point, it may well be out of color sync.
Philco's tuning eye (and GE's tuning meter, which was used for the same purpose and operated on the same principle) prevented such mistakes. All the viewer had to do was adjust the fine tuning until the two segments of the eye tube just met (or the GE tuning meter was at its maximum reading for the channel to which the set was tuned); this was the point at which the tuner was now set exactly to the center of the channel and at which the color picture was at its best.
The Philco tuning-eye TV was made, IIRC, in the late '60s (I saw a picture of one of these sets in a 1967 issue of Mechanix Illustrated magazine, in an article on then-new color TV designs).
The two letters S on either side of the Philco's red emblem badge on the front panel may (and I emphasize *may*) stand for "solid state", though in my heart I doubt it very much. A TV of that vintage (except for Moto's works-in-a-drawer set, of course) isn't likely to have many transistors in it, if it has any at all. In fact, the only place I can see that Philco having transistors is in the UHF tuner, and even then it would likely only use one as a UHF oscillator (I don't think any of the major manufacturers, and certainly not the cheaper makes, ever used fancy-dancy UHF tuners with IF amplifier stages).