Adding Composite Input (Capacitor Question)

[ARC Tech-109]

Friday the 5th and the tuner is once again alive with a new RF amp and osc/mixer. My theory is they were somehow damaged internally when the IF connector brushed against the 120VAC terminal of the fuse holder and the replacement confirms this. Everything is now on the mark up to the video amp and now I have to sort out the chroma problems.

To back up some 40 years the set took on some lightning damage when a tree was hit and this killed both the phase detect and killer diodes, I replaced them with modern silicon small signal diodes but it was never quite the same and this was the real reason the set was replaced with a Zenith S-III and I ended up with the albatross in my bedroom. Now I want to get the set running like it used to and this has been quite the uphill battle. I found a set of what I thought were good NOS 1N270's and 1N34A's but they're all leaky passing tens of mv in reverse with no two quite the same. Plan for the time being is to "soft wire" in a 6JU8 and see how that goes, not the most elegant but they worked before in this service.

I will post my findings here so as it's been said in the past, Stay Tuned.

[kf4rca]

Try 1N914 or 1N4148 diodes. They're good to about 100 MHz. and are cheap. Radio Shack used to sell them for $1.99 for a hundred diodes.

[ARC Tech-109]

Had the 914's in there and the drop is too high for the magnavox circuit so I wired up a 6JU8 in their places and ran thru the entire IF and chroma alignment and everything came together. Yes we have success. A few loose ends to tie up, one seems to be an issue with horiz blanking that's causing the right side of the screen to essentially go into cutoff. Bias and guns are set correctly and the cutoff remains when I run the horiz gun adjustments. Other issue is a touchy AGC and this seems to be a bad AGC pot on the rear apron, have not put an analog meter and run the control thru its range as of this evening.

Ended up replacing all of the tubes on the IF strip with new-old-stock. I sourced the tubes from AxMan Surplus in St. Paul MN which is this bazaar of electronics and other things that's been in business for almost 60 years and they have everything... and I mean everything including thousands of new-old-stock tubes in their original cartons so for $2.50/ea so I invested a good hour scanning thru them and got the everything I needed.

IF strip took a good three hours to get the response back into shape, I'm working with a Heathkit IG-57 sweep/marker generator that has seen better days. The IF sweep works correctly but for some reason the markers themselves are not so I had to basically eyeball the response curve and work from there, I used my Motorola R2670 service monitor to sweep the response of the chroma section as this has calibrated sweep/track and spectrum analyzer functions.

Once I clean things up a little I will snap a few realtime pics of the set in operation, source will be from a Sony VO-2860A editor and whatever tape I happen to grab.

[kf4rca]

Great. I'm glad things are coming together for you. I would think a silicon diode would have better performance specs than a germanium diode or... a tube.
AxMan sounds a little like WierdStuff out in San Jose, Ca.
I've got a Singer FM10CS service monitor but I use it mostly for radio work. Goes to 512MHz.
Looking forward to the pics of this Franken-set!

[ARC Tech-109]

I'm sure the 1N914 is better overall but the problem seems to be riding the crest of the waveform with the small signals and its higher forward voltage. Once I went to the 6JU8 the chroma response was far better. This set never had what I'd call "stellar" color, it was good but maybe I'm spoiled by the sheer number of broadcast monitors. Dunno, it uses the 6HS8 as an X-Y demod and from what I remember this design was an "acceptable" lower cost design albeit not as accurate as the R-Y B-Y or I/Q with what appears to be a slower phase response. Good enough for the 1970's I guess when everything was burnt orange with splashes of primary colors here and there.

So everything was working well last night when I shut things down around 0400 central, just before this I dribbled a little hot wax down the IF coils to lock the slugs in place then checked the response curve and picture once again and everything was on the mark.
This afternoon I resumed my work as the outside temps went to the low 90s with mid-60 dewpoints, fired up the set and noticed a really bad picture, checked the IF response and found it had a very sharp peak going just above the picture carrier that wasn't there last night after I dropped the wax.
Ran thru the IF again and locked the slugs in place and everything is holding at the moment, I'm wondering if this might be a moisture issue as the humidity went from roughly 55% to almost 80% over the past day. Not much for air conditioning unless it's oppressive like this afternoon.

Did verify the AGC pot with an analog Triplett 630-NA meter and found it has several "scratchy" points along the travel so it's another trip on the motorcycle to AxMan Surplus in St. Paul as they have bins of these. Minneapolis/St. Paul area used to be a big tech hub during the early computer days with the likes of Sperry-UNIVAC, Honeywell, Control Data, ADC Telecom and IBM in Rochester and had two dozen surplus stores full of this stuff. By the mid-80's only a few remained and today AxMan is the last one standing after almost 60 years in business, they have enough inventory in that building to go another 60 years and it's always busy.

I got the Motorola R2670 monitor during my days at the regional service depot, employees could buy their test equipment at cost and pay for it out of salary. I optioned this one with the everything I could and it's served me well. Other bench test equipment includes a Tek 475 scope, Motorola R1011B 40 amp power supply, along with the various Bird RF meters. TV service is done with a late 60's Tek 453 scope originally from IBM, it has nuvisters on the front end and can survive a kilovolt hit to the input jacks. I also have the Heathkit IG-57A IF sweep/marker and B&K 1246 dot/bar generator plus 466 and 467 pix tube analyzers. Yes I'm on the trailing edge of 1970s technology.

[ARC Tech-109]

Okay so an update on the Bench Queen; it's running. I still have to iron out a few ripples in the IF section but it's a happy set after 20 years of idle time. Going to run thru the Heathkit manual for the IG-57A sweep/marker generator again and see if I can't find why the markers themselves are dead.

The big issue came down to a bum resistor on the horiz keying pulse, schematic called for a 270K and by color codes that's what I replaced the original with, turned out to be 27K on the meter. Red-Violet-Orange and 5% gold stripe so I went thru and verified ALL the replacements. Guess that's why Ohmite calls them "Little Devils". So once the correct value was in place everything started to act normally, AGC is good but still getting the horizontal bends and trails on high contrast scene details, vertical size is a little challenged despite a new tube and known correct resistor values. I suspect the Boost B+ is low.
Convergence was a challenge that had me stumped for several hours, replaced all the selenium diodes on the board but wasn't getting the correct horizontal actions until I bumped the input connector and discovered a number of traces had broken right where the Molex pins were soldered to the board and lifted the pads. Servicing the set I'd run it with the chassis out of the cabinet sitting on some tape cases then when it was time for the bench would just disconnect everything at the Molex connectors, the sheer number of cycles broke the traces. Once that was rectified the convergence fell into place for the most part, still doesn't respond to the R/G diff tilt so that's on the to-do list.

So overall it's getting there, not quite up to where it was back in the day but now an incentive to keep moving forward. One thing it still has is RF sensitivity. Growing up I remember the DX football games with this massive antenna and Alliance U-100 rotator, there were tape markings for the station positions all around the face and every fall we'd have to check all the flat cables. In the house I can run the modulator on a 1/4 wave antenna with good results.

Got loads of detail pictures of the chassis and operation, give me some time to smash them down to fit the server limitations and I will post them