A quick CTC 16 question

[JohnCT]

Originally Posted by Aperna1985

I don't see any retrace lines, other than being blue it's a good picture. I'm wondering could I turn off all the colors then bring up one color at a time to see if all the guns work?

Certainly, that's the way we accessed the condition of those tubes back then. Turn all screens down and advance each one. They should roughly be the same but be aware that due to the color spectrum, the green will be the brightest, the red close but not as bright, and the blue (even with a strong gun) won't look as bright and crisp and the green and red.

If your blue looks good, the red and green should look better. From your description, you have a soft tube. It might perk up if you run it a few hours continuously.

Originally Posted by Aperna1985

I didn't see a switch, and it looks like it just does isolation not brightening. It would be nice of it was a chassis problem that someone tried to fix with the isolation transformer.

We don't know who worked on it and we don't know why he tried it or if he even knew what he tried was simply an isolation "brightener" (he may not have know the difference between a brightener, and isolator, or a combo device).

I worked on tons of those when they were daily drivers and while soft guns were common (I must have changed several hundred 21" roundies), heater to cathode shorts were not all that common in these tubes.

My guess is that they correctly diagnosed a weak picture tube and added the isolator thinking it was a heater boost brightener.

John