[Jeffhs]

Yes, those small Zenith TVs are excellent sets. I had one, a J121Y 12" solid-state portable, that went 22 years without a hitch and was still working when I gave it up in 2000, due to space issues in my apartment (I already had two 19" color sets and no room for a third, even a small portable). I think someone in my apartment building must have grabbed the small set when I put it out for the trash, as I looked out there a day or so later, before the trash was to be collected, and the TV was gone. I hope whomever picked up the set got some use from it, as it was still working almost like new--great picture and all, except the detent mechanism for the UHF tuner was broken, jamming the tuner on one channel....wouldn't you know it, a blank channel in my area.

I had not heard of the issues with the shims in UHF continuous tuners until I saw this post. I always thought those tuners were almost trouble-free, as the pre-1975 ones do not have the detented UHF channel selector. Is the problem being described a common one with continuous UHF tuners? I have owned several TVs with this type of tuner and never had such a problem, although I have had to have the detent mechanism disabled in one (my 1979 Zenith L1310C 13" color portable) when it broke. (Was this also a common failure in TVs using this type of tuner?) The tuner in that set then operated exactly like the pre-1975 ones, but it was plenty good enough for my purposes, until I gave up that set some 20 years later. One of the best things Zenith ever did with their small portable color sets, IMHO, was to do away with those detent UHF tuners and replace them with fully-electronic frequency-synthesized all-channel tuning systems. The ones in my Zenith Sentry 2 and RCA XL-100 CTC185 haven't given me five minutes worth of trouble, especially since the ground points on the CTC185's on-board tuner were resoldered; this was a very sore point with RCA/Thomson's CTC-17x through about the CTC202 chassis. It was finally licked in the CTC203 to current production; these sets have the tuners mounted separately from the main chassis, eliminating the grounding issue that plagued so many earlier chassis in that series. The problems loose or outright missing grounds caused in these tuners included loss of the EEPROM programming (due to noise entering the chip), which rendered the set unusable since this IC controls the operation of the entire TV. I can only guess how many of these sets were repaired under warranty (or put out for the trash if out of warranty) because of these issues. The number must have been huge, considering what a problem the onboard tuners were.