Gec 2028 latest purchase

Well, hens teeth and £3.00 coins are more plentiful?

Looks a good set

I always liked these little GEC sets. I had one, once, but could never resolve a problem with the colour - it had none! What it did have was an absolutely fantastic B&W picture, beautifully converged and magnificent grey-scale, and even had the light telling me we were receiving colour, but absolutely no colour was visible on screen!

Now that was all of forty years ago, and I am hopeful of finding another one some day. I'm not sure what happened to mine, other than the dreadful day when my brother took his JCB and flattened the building which was once the workshop/store room, and destroyed the stash of tellies that my granddad left me, and most likely, the 2028 among them.

If you ever part with it, give me nod, if I could afford it I'd love another one, just a pity I can't help out with the PYE...

Other sets aquired at the same time 

pye 725 22 inch solid state 

PYE CT200

PYE Chelsea 718

PYEs for supper?!

Ouch! - shouldn't the GEC at the bottom of that pile? I can't help but feel sorry for the PYE it's sitting on!

I must say, that 'Chelsea' looks like a nice set. Have you got the tips for the slider controls?

Katie_Bush said

I must say, that 'Chelsea' looks like a nice set. Have you got the tips for the slider controls?  

The Pye 713 chassis, may look nice but their performance was pretty dire.

The 725 chassis was OK, I found them quite reliable, much better than the more expensive 110 degree 731 chassis.

Frank

Frank is right, the Pye 725 models were not bad at all and were indeed much more reliable the 110 degree 731 sets upon which the 725 was developed from.  I wasn't a Pye dealer, instead I rented out the Ekco  badged version, the CT822. In 1975 Ekco became a wholesaler brand and from 1973 on the Invicta brand name was no longer marketed by the Pye group.  Returning to the 725 chassis, the IF selectivity unit often gave problems and the firm LEDCO made a replacement PCB which employed a SWAF. End of problems.

              In less than two years time my GEC 2028 will have been in my possession fifty years! It's over a year since it was fired up. In the late '70s the set was hard wired for 625 lines only, the burnt out line output transformer was substituted with one from the 2040 series.

Till Eulenspiegel.

I did have problems with the 725 IF strip but after soldering up the feedthrough links I had no further trouble. I suppose it depends on how long they were in service, the last I saw was about 7 or 8 years old, quite possible they became more unreliable with age.

One of the worst makes I had to deal with for poor joints on feedthrough links was Toshiba. I found I may has well do them all in one go, took a while but it saved call backs for a different fault but still related to the links. The motherboard and various modules used them, it was only the imported sets, the ones built with Rank used a different chassis. After saying this, once the joints on the Toshibas  were sorted out they just worked.

I cannot remember when we stopped with the Ekco sets and started with Pye, I tended to look at them as the same with different cabinets, which is what they were. Stock always came from the Pye rep not a wholesalers. Has you say it must be 1975, you have a much better memory of these things than me. 

Frank

Hi Frank, We did get the full service life out of the 725 models and in fact I didn't have too much trouble with the 731 110 degree set, although there was only a small number of those out on rental. What it would have been like if there had been hundreds of them hired out is a different story.  Many GEC 2028 sets soldiered on right up to late seventies. My pet hate is the late production Pye CT205, a good simple design but towards the end  they were filling the sets up with poor quality components, and the CRT wasn't very good either. These sets were being flogged off at £199! That's cheap when you consider other 22" sets were £50 to £75 dearer.

Till Eulenspiegel.

Till Eulenspiegel said
 My pet hate is the late production Pye CT205, a good simple design but towards the end  they were filling the sets up with poor quality components, and the CRT wasn't very good either. These sets were being flogged off at £199! That's cheap when you consider other 22" sets were £50 to £75 dearer.

Till Eulenspiegel.  

I totally agree with you there. I used to take them out of the box, change a number of the blue ceramics in the IF strip, complete realign everything in the set, I.F, Decoder etc. They gave a decent picture after that but I couldn't do much about the build quality of the PCB's and the CRT's soon went low emmision, good job we always had the 4year guarantee to fall back on. Luckily I had the test equipment to do it properly.

Those PCB's certainly caused problems, even with sets not that old.

I did not consider them fit for sale unless I did that work, unfortunately the boss had bought 50 of them. I thought they should have been returned but that's how it goes. 

The 18inch CT200, we did send back, just did not stand up to the competition.

Sad end to makes that once had excellent products.

Frank

I think we can blame the discount stores, they forced the manufactures to lower their standards in order they could sell cheap and still make a decent profit.   Forget the stories they were working in a few per cent markup, I'd reckon the discounters were not on 25% markup but certainly not less than 15%. Probably the same as the trade wholesalers.

Fortunately, we could offer the customers much better service than the discount stores, but they sure did damage the industry.

Till Eulenspiegel.

Katie_Bush said

I must say, that 'Chelsea' looks like a nice set. Have you got the tips for the slider controls?  

Unfortunately the knobs are missing & 3 sliders  are broken but I have replacement sliders so it's just knobs I will be looking for .

i quite like the small PYE sets even though they didn't produce the best picture in the world .

Chris

The_Teleman said

Unfortunately the knobs are missing.................................. so it's just knobs I will be looking for .

Hi Chris,

I've quite a store of knobs not many B&W 405 stuff but a huge stock of CTV knobs from all types of 70's sets. Without exact dimensions or fitting types I hooked out a few that look to be what you need. There are many more, you're more than welcome to rummage for what your sets needs.

Thanks Chris , the ones at the front right look very much like the ones .

when I get a minute I'll pop round as I still have those EHT triplers to drop off 

Chris 

No problem, any day of the week or weekend is fine. Just drop me a pm beforehand to ensure I'm in as I often go for walks. ?