Rca ctc-118

[zenith2134]

My friend picked this TV up for me. It is a 1983 19" RCA with the CTC-118A chassis.

It had a shrunken vertical, frozen contrast and tint controls, tilted picture, and terrible focus. Just a pale blue picture. Tuners needed cleaning of course.

So, it still has its original main filter capacitor, at the back. It tested fine so I left it.

The customer controls responded very well to Faderlube, and the tube focused right up.

Bad 30 uF, 100v electrolytic fixed the vertical. The video output board was pretty well used and I reflowed the solder points on the output transistors.

So, another fine daily watcher. Made in USA, original RCA 19VLNP22 tube, the same type which was used in many other domestic brands at the time, including in arcade monitors.

This exact model is listed on the auction site for $300 ... That's a laugh; they'd be lucky to get 30-40 bucks for a clean example.

Going to whiddle down a piece of thin wood and epoxy a new control door on mine. The hinges are still there so it should be an easy job.

I'd honestly rather have the knob-tuned model of this set, instead of the model with remote and on screen display. I have one somewhere and it has erratic tuning problems due to the electronic tuning modules. Tedious to work on those; I just made sure all the grounds were solid and it ran for a few years before acting up again.

[liammc00]

nice 19" RCA TV. hopefully i can one day get my 13" RCA from 1984 to work. Mine has something wrong with the tuner. you can hook up most RF modulators to it and you get a very snowy picture with faint image and on more powerful RF modulators will get a clear picture but no color. also some of the user controls have had shafts broken off do to plastic being very brittle. Like to fix it because its not in bad shape and has a very good CRT still. it will probably become a parts site if cant figure out what the problem is.

[zenith2134]

If that 1984 set was mine, I'd probably try and find another one with a good IF/tuner setup, and use the current one as a parts set. That is unless you're comfortable tracing out and repairing the tuning issue in yours. Might just need a basic alignment, or have a supply voltage off somewhere.

Anytime I deal with a set that has broken potentiometer shafts or other hard cosmetic damage, I use it for parts.

These are a very underrated series of TVs though. As my friend used to say, these are the type which you could turn on, abandon your house, and come back years later with the thing still playing....Very reliable

[radiotvnut]

The ones with digital electronic tuning were always a pain and RCA was very proud of those tuner and control modules. In fact, many of those sets were condemned because the customer declined the estimate for a tuner and/or control module replacement. The one like what you have and the single-knob varactor version were way more reliable.

[zenith2134]

That rings a bell: the control module was the one that acted up on mine. Not fun having to solder all the tiny internal connections. Maybe the aliens helped them design that system or something!

I've got a CTC-120 with the single knob tuner and it had the annoying wavey picture caused by the L201 audio discr coil. Which, of course cracked when I tried adjusting it. That was around the time I pony'd up for a proper set of non magnetic diddlin tools. Essential to have on the bench.

This one's alignment seems solid so I left it alone. All it takes is to look at it the wrong way to throw it off.