Quote:
Originally Posted by toxcrusadr
Near Lake Erie I see...if you're near Cleveland or Akron there are some radio repair shops that would probably take care of your radios for a decent price. You're in the middle of Radio Land over there.
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I'm not "in the middle" of anything where I live. The so-called "radio land" you mention is 40-odd miles southwest of me in an area composed, in part, of the Cleveland suburbs of Parma and Seven Hills; it is where all the TV and AM/FM radio towers serving northeastern Ohio are located. My analog TV reception here was so bad without cable I might as well be 140 miles away; digital, forget it, as I would probably get only one station well enough to watch, the same as analog was.
I am really nowhere near Cleveland (where I live is a small town 35 miles east of downtown), and even further from Akron. Moreover, I do not drive and don't know anyone here, so how would I get my radios to any repair shop if there are any such places that will still even look at vintage electronics? (There is a ham radio operator on the next street over from here, but he must have some sort of ax to grind where I'm concerned as he will not have anything to do with me--and I did not do or say anything to turn him against me.) The only TV repair place near here is five miles away or so in the next town, and they wouldn't touch vintage or antique electronics with a ten-foot oscilloscope probe. I know this for a fact because about five years ago, I asked them to look at my 1951 Zenith H511Y radio. They refused. These people won't even look at anything that old, even if I brought it in personally.
If they won't so much as look at (let alone repair) a 58-year-old radio, I honestly doubt very much that they would have anything to do with any of my other vintage radios, all of which, except a 1980-vintage Zenith 13-transistor portable and a Zenith solid-state clock radio of the same vintage, were made over 40 years ago. Most technicians working in what few TV shops there are nowadays know very little if anything about repair of tube-type electronics, having been schooled in solid-state repair techniques. I am reminded of a cartoon I saw years ago in an old issue of an electronics magazine, in which two TV technicians were looking at a 30-year-old TV set with vacuum tubes. Neither technician could figure out what those glowing things on the chassis actually were, so one of them, in disgust, asked the other, point blank:
"What the hell is a vacuum tube?"
This may be how many modern TV technicians (AK members such as Doug, drh4683 in Chicago excepted, of course) actually see tube-powered TVs nowadays. Never having seen a vacuum tube in their lives, the sight of these glowing things throws them for the devil of a loop more often than not; in other words, they wouldn't know the first thing about repairing radios or televisions using them.