[Jeffhs]

Your new (to you) Admiral portable TV looks great, and the picture is excellent--even after 37 years. (It must not have been used much by its previous owner if the CRT is still this bright after all these years.)

It's a good thing you explained the meaning of that large dark "X" on your TV's CRT, as the mark could have otherwise been mistaken for an X-shaped ion burn, which was quite common in older rectangular b&w CRTs. (I don't know if there was such a thing as ion burn in color tubes.) However, that mark must have been made with a grease pencil if you were able to remove it as evidenced in your second picture of the TV in operation.

At first I thought it was a tube-type set, but after reading your post more carefully I found the set was solid state. Zenith had a line of solid-state b&w 12" portables as well in '78; I bought one after my trash-find 1969 Zenith 19" b&w portable gave up (gassy horizontal output tube, 22LF6 IIRC, unobtainable at the local TV shop, was throwing the keyed AGC all out of whack). My new Zenith 12" SS TV lasted me (no kidding) 22 years, from 1978 until 2000, and was still going strong when I got rid of it (no room for it in my then-new apartment, as I had brought my 19" 1995 Zenith table set with me from my old house, and had purchased a new RCA CTC-185 when I moved here).

BTW: I hope whomever, if anyone, picked up my SS Zenith after I put it out for the trash got a few more years of use out of it, as the CRT was plenty bright and the set itself worked perfectly, except for the UHF channel selector detent mechanism which broke and jammed the tuner on one channel. These days, of course, the condition of the UHF tuner is immaterial since most older TVs are used with cable boxes or OTA converter boxes, all of which have RF outputs on channel 3 or 4.