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Old 10-02-2006, 01:16 PM
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Jeffhs Jeffhs is offline
<----Zenith C845
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Fairport Harbor, Ohio (near Lake Erie)
Posts: 4,035
Jordan -

Glad you got that CTC16 roundie; as another poster said, it's good to see that someone got this set with the intention of restoring it to its former glory, not just to gut the cabinet and make a bookcase, fishtank, etc. of it. These old TVs are becoming scarce; as I have said many times here, it is up to us AK members to save them from a certain death in a landfill. Most people outside our hobby don't care what happens to their old TV after the flyback, CRT or some other component goes bad and puts the set out of commission; all they want is to get the thing out of their home ASAP--that or else they gut the set, throw the chassis and CRT in the trash, and use the cabinet for something else, or else they put the whole thing on the curb, cabinet and all. The old set is almost certainly replaced with an offshore-manufactured TV (CRT or, more likely today, flat-panel HD) that has next to no value to collectors.

I looked at the pictures you posted and was reminded of the TVs we had in our school when I was in grade school in the '60s; those sets were RCAs with the same front panel layout as your CTC-16, only the sets in our school were b&w table models with rectangular CRTs. In fact, when I got to junior high (middle school) in 1970, I saw the same models of TVs in the classrooms--same control clusters, screen size and all. That must have been a very popular model in the mid-'60s, especially for educational and/or commercial use. It's probably safe to say that the sets used in schools were used mostly or mainly (perhaps even exclusively) on the area's educational TV station. In grade school I remember we had a master-antenna distribution system (years before cable was as popular as it is today) which converted all UHF stations to VHF channels. The educational (PBS, then known as NET) channel in Cleveland is channel 25, which was downconverted to VHF channel 4 in the distribution system. However, my point is that the continuous UHF tuners in our sets probably were not used at all, so when the sets were eventually retired (the grade school I attended was closed and converted to a senior citizens' center in the early 1980s), the UHF tuners may well have been in excellent shape, even if the rest of the sets were on their last legs or outright shot.

BTW, I would date your set a few years post-1962, because it has a UHF tuner. Factory-installed UHF was not mandated by the FCC until April 30, 1964, though earlier sets, RCA and others, often had provisions for UHF, with a small knockout plug on the front panel where the UHF tuner was to be installed. (My aunt and uncle had a Sylvania console TV in the '60s with such an arrangement, but since Cleveland only had VHF channels 3, 5 and 8 at the time [the city didn't get its first UHF station, a PBS affiliate, until 1965], they never had the optional UHF tuner installed or even used a converter ahead of the VHF tuner.) In fact, I would probably guess that your set was made in 1965 or '66.




Kind regards,
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Jeff, WB8NHV

Collecting, restoring and enjoying vintage Zenith radios since 2002

Zenith. Gone, but not forgotten.
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