Hi everybody and especially Brad for providing this forum.

I've been watching the site on and off for several months and I've finally decided to join as I feel I can contribute something.

From my user name it can be seen that my main interest is televisions but I also have an interest in old radio and radiograms. I have a fondness for the Kriesler and Philips brands but my interest is fairly general as I find all the brands interesting.

The period that I cover is 1956 with the introduction of B&W TV up to the late 1970's which includes the 1st and 2nd generation of colour TV.

Compared to the resources available for collectors overseas, Australia is noticeably lacking in online resources for collectors of vintage electronics and information on TV's seems to be almost non-existent.
I hope via this forum that some work can be done to improve this situation.

I have started to collect a fair bit of paper documentation on the various brands and models so if anyone has any questions I'll try to answer them.

Regards, Andrew

G'day Andrew,

Welcome to the forums. I agree with your comments on the availability of material on vintage electronics. At times it is quite frustrating to search for things on the Internet to end up drawing a blank.

When I first started this website in 2003 it was really only ever intended to be a personal site but I knew it would never amount to much unless I allowed literally hundreds of other collectors to get involved, even in a small way. The big question was how to go about it. Given that there wasn't a lot of other information available at the time I knew that trying to gather it myself with the limited resources I have would not yield a good result and the fact that there were no Australian-based discussion forums at the time (that I knew of) left me with only one option - add discussion forums to the site. The forums have been here for about five years and many members have done well to contribute information and opinions. Of course I value the presence of those that are here to ask questions too. Forums need both groups of people to be successful.

After five years I now ask myself the same question - where to from here? The forums desperately require extra functionality and the currently used technology won't allow most of the remaining uncoded features requested by members so I am developing a whole new site with plans on a clean sheet of paper. The end result is still about six months away though however the new site will provide the feature set everyone wants to have, plus a few little goodies I plan on introducing from my own to-do list.

There are also some content-related ideas I have which will come with the new site provided the legal advice I seek goes my way. I don't want to surprise everyone with new content if it ends up that someone claims a copyright infringement resulting in the loss of the said content.

If you or anyone has any other ideas on what could be included here I am always happy to listen.

Hi Brad, Thanks for the welcome. Your plans to expand the site sound very good and I hope it all goes to plan as it is a resource that would fill a currently very empty area of localized information.

I have some ideas about possible features and content which I'll raise with you sometime soon. I believe that some of my ideas may coincide with some of your own ideas on your "to do" list.

Andrew