[Yamamaya42]

Things I'm wondering about...

that mystery 680k pullup to 275v that was never hooked up, should it be tried now perhaps, because it does have an effect on the IF/tuner.

The 2 150 ohm resistors (measured from 5-6 on rf amp ) was collectively 438 ohms, which is quite a bit over 30%, (46%, from what I can tell.) I don't know which one is bad (most likely both ) and what the loss of possible balance is doing to the amp circuit, I can only speculate on how it really works right now.

I do have a mostly working analog multimeter, and will try to measure the plate resistance again on the RF amp.

Plan to do...
Remove the run of balanced 300 ohm wire running from the back of set to tuner and solder channel master cm-94444 balun directly into tuner, grounding 75 ohm to chassis via cap.

Replace peaking coils & video output tube (have 2 out of 5 ordered so far ) , hoping this will stop video smear.

Add contrast mod as mentioned before.

I have a new digital rf signal generator & LCR meter, no idea when they will get here, will re-try alignment when it comes, with exact freq set (I hope) and amplitude control.
Will also be able to test the old coils.

And after all that, I still can't get a clear pic w/o snow / RFI, perhaps convert to A/V input.