Hello, I am a new-ish collector, I have a bunch of TV's and radios, but I need more B/W sets, I have only three, two 5' portables and a 12" portable, I have a 23 inch NEC model 2-666 as my main TV, It came from my school but I love the thing to death, and I also have another PC but meh I need a composite out card for hooking it to my NEC so I can broadcast old shows , My name is Nathan, I also know Chris from youtube as well, me and my TV's are still going, yet getting old by years to come

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"I'd rather have a CRT than nothing" - me
"people just throw working CRTs out, it is NOT FUNNY!" -me

Glad to see you found the site Nathan! Welcome! If you have any questions, comments or the such, just post them here. Also, if you have any photos you want posted, send them to Brad, or alternatively, upload them to an external site (Image shack, Flickr etc.) and post the link here.

Chris (from Youtube)

Thanks Chris, I know how to do that so lol I am going to post pictures of my collection, and my PC too

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"I'd rather have a CRT than nothing" - me
"people just throw working CRTs out, it is NOT FUNNY!" -me

I'll send you Brad's email.

Chris

Welcome Nathan.

I note from your other post that you are 14 years old. Brad may correct me, but I think yours may be the youngest membership yet recorded here.

As with everybody new to high voltage electronics, please make yourself aware of the dangers of and accepted safe practice when working on such circuits.

Any questions about that, please feel free to ask.

Brad may correct me, but I think yours may be the youngest membership yet recorded here.

It would come fairly close.

I started when I was 17 and at the time that was considered young, given that most of the collectors at the time were veterans of the large manufacturers or the Postmaster General.

It is good to see that young people are still taking an interest. Be careful with the guts of televisions though - some of the parts hold electric charges for a long time and bite hard.

Best way to continue the trend is let everyone we all know that this site is here and that plenty of radios and televisions are still available from numerous sources.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

Brad,

About six or seven years ago, I pulled apart my old XBox console, because it had completely stopped working. I dismantled it, removed some of the components (I'm not exactly sure of how I did it, considering I didn't have a soldering iron), and stored them in an old box.

Earlier this year, I was sorting through the box and stumbled across some electrolytic caps in the bottom, and after getting a minor 'tingling' from picking up one, decided to test them with a multimeter. Several of them were still holding a pretty high charge after six/seven years!

Anyways, back to topic, the CRT and PSU would be the most dangerous parts of a television. The CRT because of the EHT anode and focus voltages, high vacuum inside, and chemicals/materials used (phosphors, lead, small amounts of mercury etc), and the PSU because it's operating at high voltages (mains ~250V 10A), and components like electrolytic caps can store a deadly charge for an extended period of time.

Chris

Yep, human fingers make a perfect bleed resistor. The same applies to microwave ovens. Many of them have quite a large capacitor near the magnetron (which is just a valve with a cold cathode really) and these give enough of a whack to kill and have caught a few servicemen unawares over the years. There's probably fewer incidences today than in years going back because you'd be hard put finding someone to fix a broken one now. People usually just throw them out and buy another one.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

Yeah, I got one set going by replacing resistors, and here is my collection so far and ME I prefer CRT's so I have my NEC model 2-666 as my main TV, It is a beautiful set, its the set below the other two.
Image Link.
Image Link.

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"I'd rather have a CRT than nothing" - me
"people just throw working CRTs out, it is NOT FUNNY!" -me

Brad, I always though that one bite from a microwave oven cap would 'eliminate the need to ever use a microwave oven again', to put it kindly. I know that some have notoriously dangerous transformers though..?

Nathan, are you able to post some larger photos, maybe of individual televisions and computers in your collections? I had to squint and almost head-butt my monitor to see them...

Chris

This strong dollar and cheap chinese appliances are making it mighty hard for technicians.
When you can buy a DVD player for under $30 at Coles, why would you even bother getting it looked at.

I spent a couple of hours this morning chasing an IF fault on a Vertex two-way (more chinese junk)

It ended up costing about half replacement value, but the customer needed it in a hurry.

Interestingly enough WES components still stock a lot of TV & VCR parts, as well as microwave oven bits. Before christmas I saved a microwave for a relative for a couple of bucks. New HV fuse/holder did the job.

Ordinarily I wont touch that kind of thing, but family......... I'm sure you all know about that.

And yes, microwaves would be one of the most dangerous of appliances in the wrong hands. I strongly recommend our younger members dont even consider taking the lids off one. We want you to become old members



Ben

Ben, thanks to cheap Chinese imports, consumer electronics repair is a dying industry. For the price it costs to repair something, you can buy a new one which is twice the size or offers double the performance. Heck, most stuff is designed to be short lived and very hard to repair. Especially with all the surface mounted components and ICs/micro controllers used in appliances, you have to replace an entire circuit board, instead of a single troublesome component. I hate how electronics repair is no longer on a component level (aside from a handful of HV components in the PSU that is).

No racism intended, but thanks to all this cheap-ass junk that is flooding in from Asian countries (where people will work for a couple of cents a day), quality products will become a thing of a past. Already, we are drowning in excessive amounts of e-waste which is generated through people's desire to be up-to-date ("who wants an iPhone four, that is so last year").

People also seem to be obsessed with being up-to-date and having the newest and best appliances and electronics. A perfect example is the amount of CRT televisions being thrown out in place of flat panels. Most of the old CRTs work, some only five or six years old, yet due to the fear of 'being left behind' technologically, everyone's rushed out and bought flat panels. The only reason is really as a status symbol.

No longer is owning two televisions the latest status symbol; it's now owning the biggest and loudest television and home entertainment system.

I've kind've chosen a point in time technologically, and that's where I'm staying at for the time being - I still use a 20" CRT (in my opinion, owning a television over 29" is stupid and pointless), a brick of a Nokia, a Teac diskman CD player, and a second-generation iPod nano. I also use a ten year old computer and twelve year old 17" CRT monitor.

Anyways, that's my rant for the day (and due to my lack of thinking ability at the moment, probably makes very little sense!)

Chris

On the off-topic subject of mobile phones, I remember back to the day when my analogue phone had a far better range than today's 3G and 4G phones can achieve. The worst thing the government of the day did was force Telstra to shut down the original AMPS analogue mobile phone network. No digital offering has come close for reach, though I don't really miss the crossed lines that the analogue network was infamous for. Nothing was worse than two phone calls from the same cell locking on to each other and everyone hearing each other's conversation.

As for e-waste - many European countries no longer allow appliances to be buried in the ground. Australia should be using its vast empty spaces in the middle of the desert to store old stuff above ground until such times as technologies to recycle the hazardous bits become viable.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

Staying off-topic: the problem with the AMPS system was that while the transmission scheme had good long-distance propagation characteristics, it was very inefficient use of a limited slice of spectrum. AMPS became saturated when we got to about a million subscribers. Today there are over 30million active cellular accounts in Australia.

2G GSM (TDMA) is limited because signals are multiplexed on a time-division basis, which degrades quite rapidly with distance from the transmission tower.

3G uses CDMA (code division) for multiplexing, and this is much more robust. But system design still has to strike a balance between quality-per-channel and number of channels.

The sad fact of market economics is that buyers generally will go for cheap before quality. 3G WCDMA telephone systems are capable of delivering voice services at CD-equivalent audio quality (I've listened to demos), but almost nobody wanted to pay extra for that, so the service is not offered. The future of telephony has to be with packetized signal streams, now that we can afford so much more intelligence in transmission, switching and receiving gear. Skype is an example - high audio quality at cents per hour for international calls, transmission-agnostic.

Maven

Staying on topic, um, I am going to visit Chris on Saturday and I am going to get more TV's with him, Hopefully we find a bunch of working B/W sets and we can get them going together, I once got shocked from an electrolytic in an old bass amp that I had that I broke, Meh, I think that Chinese junk is just well Junk!!! Not our vintage TV's because our vintage TV's are awesome as hell! I'd rather own a vintage set than having to deal with a crappy flat panel, CRT"s for life!

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"I'd rather have a CRT than nothing" - me
"people just throw working CRTs out, it is NOT FUNNY!" -me