Another RCA portable working as-is

[Eric H]

I pulled another RCA off the shelf to see what it would do without any repairs.
This one is not a "Deluxe" model which I think means it uses a voltage double and not a transformer/5U4, however I haven't pulled the back yet to confirm that.

I brought it up slowly on the Variac over a few minutes to see if it would respond, it started humming at 60 volts, audio kicked in at around 85 and the screen started to light up.

By 100 volts it had a picture that was flopped over and rolling but it eventually pulled itself together into a coherent image, although a bit vertically squashed, I tweaked the height and linearity and got a really good image and sound, temporarily.

Eventually as it got hotter the vertical started to roll and eventually couldn't be stopped so it needs some caps but basically it's in good shape.

My plan is to get all my RCA's from this era running and maybe taking a group picture of them all playing at the same time.