[jshorva65]

Nice job!!! The picture on that set looks better than I get with the '90 Magnavox 25" set in my home theater system and the '90 RCA 20" in the bedroom. Now if I could just find a couple of roundie models with remote, I'd be all set.

It would be a fairly simple matter to make a 4.5 MHz "pickup" coil with no actual connection to the set and build an all-tube outboard 4.5 MHz SIF, Detector and MTS decoder based on a modified FM-MPX design and connect that via RCA jacks to my surround receiver. The main differences between MTS and FM-MPX are the pilot/subcarrier frequencies and the dbx NR applied to the L-R component of MTS, which can be convincingly "cheated" with dynamic range expansion to undo the compression which is the most noticeable component of the dbx format. There was a solid-state unit described in a late-80s Popular Electronics that did exactly that ... accepted a 4.5 MHz input and produced stereo output with a cheapie dbx workaround. There's a tube MPX decoder circuit in RCA's RC23 and RC30 tube manuals.