Quote:
Originally Posted by radiotvnut
Nice! I'm sure that CM uses an RCA clone chassis.
Does the CCII have a rotary varactor tuner or a vertical row of channel numbers with a door that opens to conceal a tuning thumbwheel next to each channel number? The very first color TV that I fixed was a 19" Zenith SC with the vertical numbered varactor tuner. IIRC, it did not have provisions for skipping channels.
|
There is a way to set up a Zenith, or any other make of TV with a vertical channel display and 12 independent varactor tuners, to tune to only the channels in the owner's local area. These sets use varactor tuners which can be set independently of one another to any channel. The procedure is simply to tune each tuner to a local station until all your area's channels are programmed. For example, in my area near Cleveland the channels would be set to 3, 5, 8, 19, 25, 43, 55, 61, which leaves four blank channels (one, if you wanted the three local channels in Canton and Akron, Ohio, 60 miles southwest of Cleveland). Now you can go directly from one local station to the next, without having to scan through blank channels. I doubt, however, if a lot of people went to the trouble to arrange their local TV stations this way; many viewers simply left the UHF positions blank (on the selector panel or drum) after setting the tuners for the locals.
The all-electronic tuners in today's TVs can be set to skip unwanted channels by means of a "delete" function on the set's main menu. This is supposed to be far easier than fussing with tuning in channels with a tiny thumbwheel on electronic varactor tuners and replacing acetate channel tabs on the selector panel or drum, but some people don't or cannot even grasp the new system, which is why one often sees TVs receiving every available channel in an area, including infomercial stations and other barely-watched channels. Most non-technical people these days buy a TV, take it out of the box, set it where their old TV was, connect the cable or antenna, and watch it, not even bothering to set the tuner for their area's local stations. This can cause some real problems in this new age of ATSC digital television (many people don't know how to "rescan" a TV or converter box when the DTV stations change channels, then wonder why they cannot receive certain channels they could receive perfectly well in analog), but in the days before digital, almost all sets made from the '80s until the end of analog were designed to be used out of the box with no setting/scanning channels or other setup required, except for connecting the power cord and the cable or antenna.
HDTV flat-panel sets are not nearly that easy to set up, as flat-panel sets often require professional calibration; another problem is the sound. Most large-screen HDTVs (except the small Philips-Magnavox, et al. 15-inch sets) do not have their own speakers and require an additional "home theater" audio system, at an extra cost to the viewer.
It seems to me as if the FCC and the HDTV industry, respectively, are forcing viewers, by degrees, to convert to digital HDTV flat-panel televisions and 500+-watt audio systems, whether the viewers want to do so or not--unless, of course, they are willing to settle for a 15-inch picture.
The other thing the industry fails to realize, IMHO, is that apartment dwellers, for the most part (unless their apartment is rather large and the residents have a very accomodating landlord), are not in a position to install 50"+ flat-panel TVs with powerful home-theater sound systems in their apartments. Most home-theater sound systems are very powerful, capable of producing window-rattling volume; one night of listening to a movie or TV show with a lot of sound effects will often be enough to cause the landlord to contact the tenant (after the former receives complaints from other tenants of "that noise in apartment 3-A"), asking at first that he or she turn down the volume. If this happens a second time, the tenant faces eviction, as loud music, TV program sound, etc. will not be tolerated in any apartment complex.
BTW, I think it was a tremendous waste of time and money to convert to ATSC digital the stations that run only infomercials. These stations obviously have some viewers, but by and large most people ignore them because they are what amounts to one all-day and all-night infomercial, and as we all know, viewers hate TV commercials.
What was the value of converting these stations to DTV? I think the FCC should have offered full-power stations that run basically infomercials or other little-watched programming the option of remaining with NTSC until or unless the stations decide to abandon infomercials for standard television programming. There are two such stations in this area, both of which are watchable on cable as they are must-carry channels here: channel 67 and, to a lesser extent, channel 23, the ION-TV affiliate (both are not even in Cleveland and cannot be received without cable). Channel 23 has regular TV shows, and even some classics, but after about ten o'clock p.m. EST they switch to infomercials until shortly before prime time the next day--there is no standard television programming (yup, you guessed it, just infomercials) on this channel all day long, from about nine a.m. until 4 p.m. and 10 p.m. until 9 a.m. EST.