I picked up a very rare 21" Pye on Friday.

How rare? Rare enough for me to hire a car and drive 2200km round trip to get it!

It's a console with the chassis below the screen and the same knob treatment as the W101. There were only a few of these produced.

It still has the original 21ALP4B CRT, labelled "Mullard" but made by RCA. I don't yet know its condition.

But the chassis had a full Philips poly re-cap way back in 1964. Full service history is documented. Last repair was in 1975!

The back is missing, unfortunately. Does anyone have a picture of what it should look like as I'll have to re-create it.

Schematic?

It's actually a W201, i.e. 90 degree.

Can post it here or email it to you, it isn't hard to find. Drop me an email if you want a copy.

The recap was in 1964, of course. Excuse the typo.

I must have seen hundreds of W201s back in my TV service days but I have never seen one like this before. Will post pics when I get to it, a few tasks ahead of it at the moment.

A link to schema should work. It prob had four IF stages for fringe reception.

Is this the beast?

https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/pye_el_pye_tecnico_w201.html

Going by the tube-list given there, it looks like it did indeed have four video IF stages (6BX6) for Fringe performance, given the dearth of TV stations in Aust at that time. It would also appear that Tecnico was given free hand to do their own design work on this due to laissez-faire attitude of British Pye parent?

Mine is a console like that one but with the earlier knobs, grille cloth rather than expanded aluminium mesh and a horizontal timber bar across the middle.

Pretty much all 1st gen Oz TVs had 4 stages of IF.

Pye did their own thing with this chassis, as they had done for many years prior to TV. The UK parent had nothing suitable anyway.

It was the same as when TV started in the US, with transmitters only in the major cities.

As in the US, if you lived outside these cities your TV signal had to travel 100 miles or more.

The 3 major networks were up and running from Day One. A 4th network appeared 3 years later.

I'd love to have an early set from the 50's like that. Would be interesting to work on that's for sure.

My Pye 17 inch W101 table top set is still going strong.

They work very well once restored.

Its price back then adjusted for inflation was ~$5k.
They could've slashed the price by cutting corners, eliminating heavy power transformer, like Ekco of that time.

I once saw a mid-sixties British Pye running. Immigrants would bring these to Aust in the hope of saving a quid.
The TV was a paragon of minimalist design: thin walled barely-there cabinet, pressed fibre back cover with grille on its top to dissipate heat from dropping resistor in place of pwr tranny! Impressive picture that resolved finest grating on ABC test pattern (5mc?) But alas no sound as Brit had 6mc intercarrier sound (maybe reason why it passed 5mc luminance)(not sure if it could have been modded to 5.5mc sound)(German TVs would play okay in Aust.)

Yes, was asked to modify several of these UK Pye's for no sound here in Australia.
From memory the IF tuned alright up to 5.5 Meg, but the ratio detector/FM discriminator was a real fiddle to bet going on 5.5 Meg.
Some success, but tried hard to steer these customers away. JJ