Muntz TV Restore

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by decojoe67

I always liked those low-budget metal Muntz sets. The sedate, plain design has an appeal. It's a nice example too.

Muntz TVs were good, but not great. I had neighbors in my home town who owned a Muntz console. Their set worked well enough, but it needed a good outdoor VHF antenna to make a decent picture (they had one, a so-called "lazy X" VHF conical antenna, on the chimney). My hometown was and still is a semi-fringe area for Cleveland TV, the transmitters being some 35 miles away (the area I live in today is worse, as it is almost 45 miles from the stations); this explains why my neighbors' Muntz set required an outdoor antenna to work anywhere near well. I don't know what type of RF amplifier tube Muntz used in its TVs of the '50s, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a very low-gain tube; I'm sure they didn't use any kind of cascode RF tube such as 6BQ7, et al., as cheaply made as these sets were.

Muntz TVs were not designed for use in fringe or semi-fringe TV areas, but I'm not surprised. These TVs had bare-bones signal circuits and needed as much signal as they could get to make a decent picture. They might, and I stress the word might, work with an analog cable box today, but I doubt it very much. I wouldn't even try to use a Muntz TV with a modern digital cable box. That is, it might work, but since digital TV signals are so much weaker than their analog counterparts; as an example, the CBS television affiliate serving northeastern Ohio had a 3.7+ megawatt ERP analog transmitter from the time it signed on in 1985, but when they switched to digital, the signal dropped to--now catch this--9.7 kW (yes, kilowatts) ERP.