Quote:
Originally Posted by KentTeffeteller
With that really stripped Muntz chassis ... reception would be limited to 10' from the transmitter. (5' if the station is UHF).
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From that I would think Muntz TVs were designed for use in very strong signal areas (urban to very near-suburban areas). However, I had neighbors in my hometown (a suburb of Cleveland) who had a 1950s-vintage Muntz console b&w TV. That neighborhood was 33 miles southwest of Cleveland's television transmitters. As far as I know, the set worked very well for them until they got a new set some time in the sixties or seventies; but then again, they did have a rather large conical antenna on the chimney of their house (the type with two separate antennas for high and low-band VHF), as most folks in the neighborhood had at that time. If the front end/IF circuitry of Muntz TVs was as poorly/cheaply designed as you mentioned, that set would make a fair to passable picture at best (even with a huge antenna as my neighbors had) in my old neighborhood and wouldn't work worth a darn where I live now (35 miles east of Cleveland and perhaps 40+ miles southwest of the TV stations), unless it were connected to cable, which wasn't available in my old neighborhood (or anywhere in the Cleveland/northeastern Ohio area, for that matter) in the 1950s through the early eighties; in fact, our area didn't get cable until 1982.
As to the advertising put out for Muntz TVs, I think it was worded as it was just to get people to purchase the sets; the problem was that they wouldn't find out, until they got the set home and hooked it up, just how overblown that advertising was. Muntz, after all, could not very well have said in their ads that their televisions were built cheaply and wouldn't work well (or at all) any appreciable distance from the TV transmitters; that sort of advertising would have killed sales of the sets in a hurry, not to mention putting the company out of business inside a year.