[Jeffhs]

A couple of notes on two posts I saw here this evening. The first one has to do with polaraman's two sets in his post. I recognize them both. His Stromberg-Carlson set rings a bell in my mind because my aunt had a TV exactly like that one in the '50s, except in a white cabinet. (How many different cabinet styles were there for that particular set?) The RCA rang a bell because my folks' first TV was an RCA console almost exactly like that one, except theirs had the speaker at the side of the cabinet and two small decorative metal bars (if I remember correctly) at the bottom of the cabinet, where the speakers are in polaraman's set. If not for these differences, these sets could have been twins.

I also saw the picture of jshorva65's TV display room. Very nicely done; I like it. However, I wonder. How on earth was he able to check those sets out for proper operation after repairing them? I ask this because every set in his display room is VHF-only; Warren, Ohio is a suburb of Youngstown, which only has UHF stations (21, 27, 33, 39 and 45). I didn't see UHF converters atop any of those sets. How does he know that the RF and IF stages are working? The only way I can think of he could have air-tested these sets (aside from hooking them up to cable) is to have hooked them up to an outdoor antenna and tested them on signals from Pittsburgh's three VHF network stations (channels 2, 4 and 11), or if his antenna was really good, he could also test using the air signals from Cleveland's channels 3, 5 and 8.

BTW, js, I like your avatar. I did a double take the first time I saw it, but later I realized it was a test signal generated from a color bar-dot generator, and the callsign/channel number was superimposed on it, like the color-bar test patterns TV stations used after round patterns went out of style and before TV broadcasting went full-time. Here near Cleveland we have a UHF station that still uses a color-bar pattern after it signs off, but the station's call sign, over-air channel number and network affiliation [it's the WB network affiliate for northeastern Ohio] are inserted in the black area below the color bars--not superimposed on the bars themselves. The PBS station in Cleveland used to do that too, when it signed off for the night around midnight--before it went to 24-hour operation several years ago.