RCA/GE CTC175-CTC203 TVs

[radiotvnut]

Yes, I know I'm getting old and it's hard to believe that it's been roughly 31 years since we were exposed to a radically different TV chassis design from Thomson Consumer Electronics, who owned the rights to the RCA/GE consumer electronics brands.

What made these sets different from everything else is they used what Thomson called a "tuner on board", which was simply a tuner circuit that was an integral part of the main circuit board. If something failed with the tuner, one couldn't just simply pull the tuner and replace it. Instead, they had to fix the tuner and with all the tiny surface-mount parts, that wasn't always easy. The main problem these gave was faulty ground connections around the tuner shield. This caused intermittent problems that included a snowy picture and intermittent vertical size issues. If the issue wasn't soon corrected, the EEPROM would become corrupted, with the most common effects being a dead set or a set with the horizontal so far off frequency that it would shut down.

The other radical change was that all service adjustments, except for the focus and screen controls that were on the flyback, were made via an on-screen service menu.

Even though those tuner problems made TV repairmen a bunch of money, it was a very stupid design and they should have used a stand-alone tuner, like everybody else did. To my knowledge, nobody but Thomson used that integrated tuner crap. You would have thought that Thomson would have gotten a clue after the CTC175/76/77 chassis, but they continued to use that type of tuner until later production CTC203 sets. Earlier CTC203 sets had the integrated tuner, while the later CTC203 sets had a standard tuner that could be replaced.

Other than the tuner issues, these sets were generally reliable (especially the CTC175/76/77/87). I recall replacing several STK regulators in the 177 and 187 and a small 10meg (I think) resistor off of the regulator that would result in a dead set. Flyback transformers were generally reliable, except for the 185 chassis. I've had to replace a few of those big blue capacitors in the HOT and pincushion circuits. The biggest issue on the 203 was cold solder connections on a coil in the horizontal driver circuit. If this wasn't fixed quickly, it would short the HOT and this would sometimes blow up the switching power supply. The jugs in those sets had a bonded yoke and usually held up, but I don't think I've ever had any luck rejuvenating a weak one.

I recall these RCAs having lousy audio quality and if you had a set with audio output jacks, you were better off connecting the set to an external amplifier and speakers.