Anyone still see CRT TVs in motels?

[radiotvnut]

The last motel I stayed in was in 2012 (I think it was an EconoLodge) and they still had 27" RCA CTC177 sets from the mid-to-late '90's and the one in our room still had a decent picture.

Before that, we stayed in a motel in 2010 and it had an LCD set in the room.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the "lower end" motels still have CRT sets, but I suspect they are not having them repaired when they stop working.

As far as motels that we stayed in during the '80's and '90's, I remember seeing one Sylvania "guest matic" that had a single-knob varactor tuner. I've seen some of the RCA sets with the built-in AM/FM radio. The older RCA's had the CTC97 "basket" chassis and a standard dual-knob tuner and the newer RCA's had something like a CTC120 chassis with the single-knob varactor tuner.

I also recall seeing some Zenith sets with built-in radios, mainly System 3 models with a 9-160 module and single-knob tuner, and the later ones with the 9-181 module with keypad tuning, and a built-in clock and radio. Somewhere around here, I have a '79 19" Zenith CC2 with built-in radio and it was a motel set.

By the mid-to-late '90's, most of what I was seeing were those horrible '90's Zenith sets with short-lived CRTs and the RCA/Thomson sets with the CTC17x chassis. I also recall seeing some Philips-Magnavox sets.

In early 1997, the head of maintenance at the local Motel 6 called and asked if I wanted to buy 20 19" GE sets for $5/each and I jumped on it. They were all knob-tuned "PC" chassis sets from the '80's and they were replaced with 19" Philips-Magnavox sets, which were still there when I went to visit someone there in 2012.

When I was a teenager in the early '90's, I met a man who used to do TV work for the local Travel Inn Motel (now long gone) and he had a bunch of broken 19" Philco-Ford color hybrids that he ended up with when the motel replaced them with Zenith system 3's in the early '80's. He gave me all of those Philco bits and pieces and I managed to make a working set out of the pile.

Not long after that, someone gave me a 19" Magnavox that used the modular T809 chassis and it formerly belonged to Day's Inn. It was a knob-tuned set that had a decorative knob behind the VHF channel knob that prevented the fine tuning from being messed with.

Back in the late '80's, some folks from India bought out a bunch of the older local motels out on the Interstate (most of these were what you'd call "flop houses") and when I was in high school, one of them approached me about doing their TV work. Basically, what they wanted was someone to fix their sets for $5/each, but they ended up giving me a couple of sets that they didn't want fixed. One was a CTC120 RCA with a busted off tuner shaft (flimsy single-knob tuner) and the other was a CTC97 RCA with a dead CRT.