Nice TV! You don't see these sets in chinese-style cabinets that often..! The top of the cabinet could use a little "TLC", but then it should look pretty sharp!
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Jeffhs
Jordan -
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.
|
That's true, and you're right about the "mandatory-UHF" date, but nearly every TV made since the UHF TV band was allocated (1952) was available with a factory-installed UHF tuner. UHF-equipped ("all-channel" as they were sometimes called) models typically ran about $20 list over their equivalent VHF-only models. A few years ago I ran across an article in an old TV-service trade magazine that had a chart showing the number of UHF-tuner-equipped sets produced per year as a percentage of total TV sets produced that year. I don't remember exact figures, but seem to recall that the percentage got to something around 30% in the mid-1950's, but fell to about 10% at its lowest point around 1958 before starting to climb back up. (Of course, after 1964, that number would have been 100%).
In any case, the presense of a factory UHF tuner (or telltale signs that one was available) only tells you that the TV was made no earlier than 1952, and the *lack* of a factory UHF tuner only tells you that the TV was made no later than 1964
(well, it could also mean that you just stumbled on a Canadian model TV, since Canada didn't mandate UHF tuners until a few years later (1970 or so?)).
More UHF TV-dating fun (but not
that kind of dating):
If the TV has separate VHF/UHF tuners and *both* tuners have click stops for each channel (or some equivalent method of "presetting" channels so that VHF and UHF tuning is reasonably similar to each other), then that's generally a clue that the set is probably 1975 or newer, but sometimes you'll encounter sets somewhat older that have click-stop UHF tuners. If the set has a regular click-stop VHF tuner but the UHF dial is a single continuous dial, then the TV should be older than 1975. (However, unlike the "mandatory-UHF" rule, the "equal-access UHF tuning" rule apparently didn't have a strict deadline; I think the FCC allowed a phase-in process of a year or two on that one) As an aside, I wonder if the FCC just kinda gave up bothering to enforce this one after a while-- in the early 1990's, I remember seeing some cheap 12" B&W TV's at Monkey Wards that had the traditional dual tuning knobs, with a regular switch-type tuner for VHF, but with a continuous UHF tuner (which covered only up to channel 69, so it wasn't like some weird old "leftover" tuner or something).
[Note that those little portable TV's with continuous tuning for both VHF and UHF are perfectly OK according to the rules, since they still provide "equivalent" tuning for UHF and VHF.]
Which brings up another thing. At some point, the RF spectrum used by UHF TV channels 70 through 83 got reallocated for various other purposes, one of which being the (now nearly obsolete) analog celluar telephone system. As such, TV manufacturers started changing the coverage of their UHF tuners to cover only channels 14-69. In sort of an interesting twist, about this time the FCC banned the sale of *radio* receivers that could receive the cellular telephone band, despite the fact that practically every American household
already had a device that could receive the FM audio information in that spectrum-- namely a television set with a UHF tuner covering up to channel 83.
Whew! I didn't mean to write that much about UHF TV tuners! Apologies for the topic drift. Anyway, I'm not trying to be a pendant; just trying to clear up a little misconception that I've seen here every once in a while.
BTW, AFAIK, the CTC-16 wasn't even introduced until 1964 or '65, so in that case I would imagine that all CTC-16's are "all-channel."