Motel TVs

[compucat]

I was a kid in the Seventies and the motel TVs always seemed to be missing the UHF tuning knob or had it blanked off. I never knew why as the sets were not connected to cable back then and there was UHF reception in the area. They were hooked into the motel's master antenna system. Was there a reason for this? Has anyone else noticed it?

[El Predicta]

I remember the 'sound governors', i.e., volume limiters, RCA used to build in motel sets.

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by compucat

I was a kid in the Seventies and the motel TVs always seemed to be missing the UHF tuning knob or had it blanked off. I never knew why as the sets were not connected to cable back then and there was UHF reception in the area. They were hooked into the motel's master antenna system. Was there a reason for this? Has anyone else noticed it?

Were the UHF stations converted to VHF? This was/is done commonly to avoid high-frequency limitations of cables and amplifiers.

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by compucat

I was a kid in the Seventies and the motel TVs always seemed to be missing the UHF tuning knob or had it blanked off. ... Has anyone else noticed it?

Here's a UHF knob off a TV in a Holiday Inn.
I remember that the UHF tuner still worked if you twisted this knob like any other UHF tuner knob. The maid always straightened it though...

[Chad Hauris]

Usually the motels which used the VHF tuner only would have a private cable system which would convert the UHF channels to VHF plus add in a few premium channels like HBO from a satellite dish. The sets I remember most were RCA's with a single knob varactor tuner and sometimes a built-in radio.

I can remember in Virginia Beach one time in the 1980's when I was a kid staying at a motel I was able to fix the sound on a GE TV with a volume limiter control. The limiter control was inside a concentric knob with another control but I had a screwdriver which would fit.

The Mural TV's probably got left on constantly and the heat buildup from the tubes led to more failures. These were usually high-end models of the consumer RCA chassis with additional features such as lighted channel numbers and a 75 ohm antenna input. The ones I have (a b/w 19" and a CTC-53 and 39) work fine after some repairs.