1958 Silvertone no picture help?

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by Tvguy80

Hi. I have have a 1958 Silvertone suburbanite. All working tubes and everything hooked up right. Has a full glowing screen but will show no picture. Does anyone have any idea why? I’ve ordered the schematics for this set they should be here In a few days. Any ideas please let me know.

You may not need to do anything drastic to your TV to get it to work as it should; in fact, if you are seeing a raster (white screen) with "snow" on the picture tube screen, and are hearing white noise, i. e. "rushing" noise, in the speaker, the set is working past the RF stages, the trouble likely being in the RF signal circuits (RF amplifier, mixer, oscillator) of the tuner. Does your set work if you connect an outside signal source, such as a DVD player, VCR, or a cable box, to the antenna terminals? If not, check the RF amplifier and mixer-oscillator tubes in the tuner, as one or possibly both are either weak or dead. (Some very old TVs, made in the late 1940s-early '50s, had two RF amplifier tubes and separate mixer and oscillator tubes; however, your Silvertone, judging by the year it was made, almost certainly has just one RF amplifier and one combined mixer-oscillator tube in the tuner.)

Remember also that today's TV signals are all digital, so connecting an antenna directly to your set absolutely will not work unless there are still one or more analog TV stations in your area (very unlikely in this day and age although some cities, such as Chicago, still have at least one analog VHF station currently on the air). Once you get your Silvertone console TV working, it will probably keep going for years to come, with a cable box or DTV converter.

BTW, when you mentioned the year, manufacturer and model name of your TV, it immediately rang a bell in my head. I had a neighbor, now long since deceased, in my home town who owned a late-'50s Silvertone b&w console TV, possibly very similar to yours. She replaced it years later with a color set, so the old one gave her many years of good service. Those old TVs, unlike today's flat screens, were built to last 15-20 years or even longer; unfortunately, we will never see the likes of those days again.