Hi ,
I have only 3 early australian TV sets, 1956 AWA 17", 1957 Astor 17" and a 1956 Electrosound Saba 17" console.

I am still interested to get a 1958 Kriesler Panoramic HiFI
and something from STC and so on.

Who likes to send me one to Germany?

Many thanks,

MonsieurTelevision

I wish you the best with getting these, particularly an STC. Sets made by Amalgamated Wireless, Philips and His Master's Voice virtually dominated the valve television era in Australia until the demise of import tariffs in the mid 1970s. Kriesler tended to concentrate on the high-end section of the market and I am not really sure if STC manufactured televisions. Another member may be able to confirm either way.

A lot of people here still dump old televisions on 'clean up' piles so I will certainly keep a look out. I usually just rat them for the valves.

Hi there MonsieurTelevision
I jut recently bought 18 old TVs off a guy and dont know much about them they are from the early 50s to 70s awa,Kriesler,hmv,astor, and pye just to name a few.they are mostly australian can you tell me much about these? which ones I should spend the time on restoring and which ones are worth keeping some work some dont but some are in perfect condition bt I cant find much on google about them cheers also some are missing backs so no model nos I have a few piks if anyone can help id be happy to email them

Hi Blingbling81,

At first, happy new year to every reader of this forum!!!!

I read your other post, I collect stamps, too.
My other intersts are music R&R - Hardcore-Techno.
I have a big 7" collection.
I can tell you much, because I printed out an australian
web-site which is not more existing.
I tried 2 times to get in contact with the owner, but he never
answered.
I have closeby all listings, which gives dates and modelnumbers from catalogues.

I just received 3 weeks ago my 4th australian TV set.
This set saw for the first time snow, as I shipped it in my
car.
It is a rare AIRZONE from1956, 17" (43cm) 70 degrees
deflection.
The set has all his papers, exept the schematic,
WHO HAS ONE WITH ALIGNMENT INSTRUCTION????

I would like to buy 2 other TVs, a 1958 KRIESLER PANORAMIC HIFI console (17") and a 1956 HEALING (17").
Germany is far away, and freight is expensive, the last
company killed me with the high price, so my interest
is reduced.
But anyway, you shouldn`t have a problem to ship, because
they crate.

I have a fat black schematic book, also from ebay, but is has no
Airzone schematics.

Best regards from Germany,

MonsieurTelevision

I must admit that I wasn't aware that Airzone made a foray into television. Airzone was owned by a larger company, Email (an acronym for Electricity Meter and Allied Industries Limited) whose core business was manufacturing watt-hour meters for electricity utilities.

Email ended up a huge manufacturing conglomerate but the demise of secondary industries in Australia saw Email get broken up and sold with the exception of one thing - making watt-hour meters, a product they still manufacture today under the brand Ampy Email.

If you are able to take a photo of the set and e-mail (no pun intended!) it to me I would be grateful. I would also be happy to publish it in this thread. It would indeed be a rare beast.

One thing I noticed over the Christmas break is the new interest in vintage television. Here in Australia dozens of them get thrown on council cleanup piles each year and in the past I have seized the opportunity to rat the valves out of them but not take the sets themselves. Maybe I should collect two or three this year. They should still work with a digital blackbox when analogue transmissions cease in the next year or so. A redundant video recorder can be used to convert the composite video to a RF signal that these old televisions will accept.

One last thing with old Australian televisions - when broadcasting began in Australia there were only ten allocated VHF channels and this was reflected on the rotary channel dials fitted to televisions in 1956. From about 1962 onwards, when television stations started to spring up in regional areas, the Commonwealth Government realised that ten channels would be insufficient and introduced an extra three, they being Channels 0, 5A and 11. You'll see these extra channels on the dials of the sets you own at the moment. The reason they didn't just add 11, 12 and 13 was because there was enough spacing between some of the lower channel allocations to fit new channels in between. As far as I know there isn't a Channel 5A on any set not destined for the Australian market. It became a handy channel for the ABC once FM radio broadcasting began in the 1970s. Channels 3, 4 and 5 sit inside the FM band and in most areas TV stations broadcasting on these channels has been shifted to either Channel 5A or the UHF band where there is an extra 50 or so channels to choose from.

So when you manage to acquire the Healing set you desire, chances are that it will only have ten channels on the dial. Not many sets from 1956 survive but there's definitely some out there. When Australians started buying coloured sets in 1974 they shifted the old B&W set to the garage rather than throwing it on the tip.

On the subject of vintage TVs being thrown away, what would be worth saving if the set looked too badly damaged to restore? Apart from knobs and valves, I'd try to save the horizontal output transformer; they're not made anymore, and differ from set to set. (According to that really good Australian website that's gone now.) Ideally, you'd save a good picture tube too, but they're big, and how would you tell if it was OK?

Hi MonsieurTelevision, I've completely overlooked that this thread had a current discussion till now.

I can help solve some questions you have about your Airzone television.

AWA also sold TV's under the Airzone, Electrice and Westinghouse brands. I don't know what the history is concerning the other brands as I have no information other than a list of equivalent models and a few Westinghouse manuals.

Your Airzone should have a chassis very similar to your 17" AWA TV. Since it is a 1956 model it would probably be an Airzone A171T (T for table top model I presume) which is the same as the AWA 201T model.

I'd be interested in hearing more about this now closed down website. I'm trying to collect information on all the Australian TV's so with a web address it may still be viewable in the Internet Archives.

I have all the service information for these early AWA's so I'll be happy to help with information.

As far as saving TV parts, it depends on how much room you have. Aside from resistors and capacitors, all the parts are near impossible to find now and have no modern equivalents.

I've saved the page on the Pye Pedigree (the early all-valve version) from the what I assume was the defunct site, but unfortunately the pictures were lost in the process. The page was at www.alectralink.com/pc/TV

Going back a long way, Westinghouse and Airzone were both under the control of Email. Whilst the Airzone brand was more popular with domestic radio and television, Westinghouse was more for the industrial sector - covering the manufacture of circuit breakers, switchboards and contactors as well as railway signalling systems.

Tooling up for R&D and manufacturing of televisions must have been a difficult ask for a small population such as Australia's because there were far fewer television production lines. Even AWA tended to borrow design ideas from Thorn in England and adapt them where necessary, moving to the use of picture tubes supplied by Mitsubishi with the move to colour in 1974.

I've found pages from the Alectralink site in a web archive, and these describe all the televisions that were available in Australia in 1956-57. The pictures are blank, unfortunately.