Guest-Book

AlistairD wrote on September 3, 2017 at 12:30 am

https://www.radios-tv.co.uk/community/black-white-tvs/oh-dear-what-have-i-let-myself-in-for-marconi-vrc54a/paged/2/#post-9355

I find it incredulous that both you and Marion have suggested the connection of normally earthed scopes and frequency counters to a TV chassis without first ensuring that it is fully mains isolated. Even if the set in question does have isolation the vast majority don't and to suggest such such a practice without discussing the safety issues is potentially dangerous. Since neither of you as admins/mods noticed this I have to seriously question your competence to run this forum. Keep in mind that this thread is in a public area for all to read.

Admin Reply:

In reference to your very rude comment above, I've published it in the interests of openness. I won't just publish all the positive comments this guestbook receives, though yours is the first negative one received. I leave folk to make their own minds up about your tone and subject matter.

Mike Kelly wrote on August 22, 2017 at 12:45 am

Like others, I found the site by accident. I started my career in 1969 as a Rumbelows trainee engineer shortly before colour on BBC and ITV started. They were exciting times, but as a trainee I was mainly mending steam irons and toasters. Progressed onto radios, tape recorders, B/W TV's and finally Colour TV. Went in to management of workshops and finally left that side of the trade in 1991 when I went to work for an insurance company that covered domestic appliances. I retired at the end of July this year. 48 years in the trade and enjoyed every minute (and got paid too!)

Admin Reply:

Thanks for dropping by Mike and leaving your comment. Rumbelows, now there's a name from the past, once bigger than Dixons, Currys and Comet. I was surprised to find that Radio Rentals bought a chain called "Fred Dawes" it was an established chain of television and radio rental shops in the 1950s. In 1969, the business was bought by Radio Rentals. All 90 of the Fred Dawes high street stores became electrical retailers instead, and were renamed Rumbelows. You had some of the best years in the trade with many exciting advances in TV/video technology, hope you have a great retirement Mike.

CES wrote on April 28, 2017 at 3:01 pm

Trolling through the Internet and came across your site, like many, it brought back many memories.
Had an apprentice with CES and serviced/repaired all products from Cassette Players, Radios to CTV. Fantastic place to work and very professional.
Went on to Philips Business Systems (first Word Processors), Motorola 8080 Processors and Qume Printers!
Great and interesting site. Big smile.

Admin Reply:

Hi CES,
many thanks for comments, glad you found the site interesting

Rob wrote on December 24, 2016 at 3:31 pm

Hello,

First of all, many congratulations on your fantastic site which - like a previous poster - I also stumbled upon by accident. As someone who was heavilly involved with Rediffusion during the 1970's & 80's, it certainly revived a lot of memories for me.

I read with great interest your article on the Rediffusion Mk.1 CH2213. Clearly, we share a determination to keep alive the Rediffusion name and the great TV's that were maufactured by them.

You may be interested to know that I purchsed a quantity of Frequency Translators and MK.3 Conversion kits from Rediffusion Service Spares in Rochdale, prior to it's closure in 1987. At that time my family owned a leasing company that supplied HF Cable versions of RCE sets to hotels & the TV industry. These included the MK.1, MK.3, Mk.3A and the MK4 Cable-only & MK.4 Hybrid.

Like you, I still own a few Rediffusion (& Doric) HF TV's, and I retained a number of these boxes to service those sets that were not, or could not, be converted to UHF working.

Generally, I do NOT sell my equipment. However, as you are clearly a dedicated fan of these sets, if you still require a Frequency Translator or any documentation pertaining to it, please contact me.

Kind Regards

Admin Reply:

Hi Rob,
Thanks for your kind comments, very pleased you enjoyed the site. Also thanks for the service data on the F.T and the replacement Rediffusion badge. I've managed to get a couple of F.T units so should be able to progress with the CH2213.

Mick curtis wrote on October 8, 2016 at 2:05 pm

Brilliant site thanks for the nostalgic trip I was a manager for RR for about 10 years

Admin Reply:

Thanks for the thumbs up Mick, its appreciated. Also glad it brought back some memories, hopefully all good ones. You worked for a great outfit, Radio Rentals was a big player back in those days and as I've often remarked to others the 700 series early colour chassis is a marvel. If you've not seen my repair of the 1967 M702 you might be interested to see it.

john wrote on October 1, 2016 at 11:37 pm

Well Well Well...who would have thought it, finding this site by accident. I was a TV engineer in the 60s 70s and early 80s...Its good to know there is a site where we can exchange our stories. I never thought that my extensive knowledge on repairing Mono and CTVs would ever be of use again. I worked for Rediffusion, Granada, and several other large retailers. I also
had a secondhand TV business and lots of Meter sets out.....So I have worked on most of the TVs mentioned in these articles... i will keep an eye on the site Thanks

Admin Reply:

Hi John, Very pleased you have found your way to the home of vintage television. Slowly but surely the ex TV trade engineers are finding their way here. You will find many kindred spirits from all sections of the trade, sharing all sorts of stories and offering hints and tips to those who collect and maintain these great old TV's. Folk like yourself who worked for Rediffusion, Radio Rentals, D|E|R, Visionhire, Thorn, Philips to name but a few. Many of us collect and repair these old sets back to working order. You will find many of the TV's you probably had out on rental in my collection pages, in various states of repair. Look forward to you sharing your experiences.

Paul wrote on August 28, 2016 at 6:39 am

Great site, brings back memories. Good to see the Radio Rentals brochure, as our first colour set was the Baird 8742, delivered during 'Scooby Doo', up and running before the program's end. You could use a small screwdriver to fine-tune the presets through a small hole in the front of each button. It was very reliable, needing few engineer visits, unlike our previous 405/625 black and white sets, and lasted 10 years.

Admin Reply:

Hi Paul Thanks for taking the time to leave your comment its nice to receive them and to know others find the content interesting. I wish I could find one of the smaller colour sets like the 8472 your family had. Sadly Radio Rentals has a policy of destroying older sets after a certain time. This fact has been confirmed to me by a couple of RR dealers/employees. Therefore very little survives to this day. Thankfully a few escaped but they are very rare now. I have three in the collection but are the much larger consoles, including one of the very first offered for sale/rent a the launch of colour in 1967.

Mark Dunstan wrote on July 6, 2016 at 4:07 pm

I used to work for the 70s colour vision it changed it name to the colour centre that is where all those oval sets came from
G11 Grundig CUC TFK Nordmende Barco
some used to come every two week to collect sets for transformation used to take about 3 weeks they were expensive at the time

Steve wrote on May 14, 2016 at 11:13 am

I worked for an independent rental company in the mid 70's, reading the trade tales was a good reminder of those days. I loved it out on the van,15-20 calls a day most if not all fixed in the customers home. Copious amounts of tea and biscuits and they were always pleased to see you because you were going to fix their telly.

Steve

Eric wrote on May 8, 2016 at 11:12 am

Hi

had to say thanks for a great website it brought back so many memories. I had no idea these old TV's were still out there or people such as yourself were still maintaining them. Reading through the stock faults had me remembering many of them that I thought I had forgot.

It was also good to browse through the brochures and your collection many of which I used to work on, looking at the insides brings it all back as if it were yesterday. I was in the trade when colour launched, it was an exciting time and days were never boring. A few of the older hands not many, hated colour but this was in part due to the transition. I left the trade around 77 you could see the way the job was heading.

Happy days
Eric

Admin Reply:

Hi Eric,
Glad you found the site and thanks for the positive comments, they are very much appreciated.

Trevor Goodenough wrote on May 7, 2016 at 4:47 pm

Hi.
This site is as good as it always was, full of a lot of excellent info.

One thing though I have been looking for is the Minimalistic Superhet Radio project that was on the forum a few years back. I was under the impression it was to be published here in its entirety.

As I've lots of time for projects due to a recent Heart operation and other further surgery I would have liked to contribute with the construction of a single valve FM set. Purely Minimalistic!

Admin Reply:

Hi Trevor, The minimalist Superhet Radio project was on the old VRAT forum which is now closed. As you may recall the project kicked off in September 2013, active member participation in the project ended around January 2014. At the time I asked for a volunteer to help write the article for this site as radio is not my thing, and I was not involved in the project, nobody offered to help. Thereafter the thread generated very little interest, attracting only two posts in the whole of 2015, both made in early January. A few chassis' were built but as far as I'm aware only one person completed the project to include cabinet. In January 2015 the Radios-TV web-site underwent a complete rebuild and 2016 the VRAT forum closed . With that in mind and the lack of interest in the project, the idea to include the project as a featured article here was dropped with no plans to resurrect it. The project is still available for people to read on the old forum which now acts as our "Archive". People can still have a go if the inclination is there, so all is not lost.

jim wrote on March 20, 2016 at 1:08 am

Superb tv industry site, started in service shop for traders only in Cardiff back in 88. flat screens and medical physics repair tech these days.

Renovate old wireless sets 1900 to 1980 weekends for private shop in town to keep my hand in. Still enjoy fault finding and the repair with soak test. Yes got the amateur radio bug along the way like so many tv repairers to.

73s all, Jim GW0WGN.

safgrantham wrote on March 1, 2016 at 8:46 am

Hi Frank,
I did 43yrs in the trade still enjoy the work, have retired now but still do a bit, but I intend to get my 9" Bush going which has been in my attic for the last 10yrs going. When I put it up there it was still working and is only band 1 never converted to band 3. My call sign is G6IPW got my licence in 1982.

regards
Stephen

elsie wrote on December 7, 2015 at 1:13 pm

hi Frank
I have just discovered this site and found your post. I was licensed back n 1977 as G80HW and later became M0BFO!
Regards 73 etc
Ian

elsie wrote on December 7, 2015 at 6:49 am

Exactly! 60" OLED still in use in 50 years i dont think any will be in use for a start no one will have any interest in whats in side or have any idea how to fix em...

elsie wrote on December 4, 2015 at 1:20 pm

I have just found this site and am nearly reduced to tears looking back at some of the old tellies we loved and some we hated... I started work at the local CO-OP as an apprentice in 1977 and enjoyed every second.

I miss it so much and engineers now sadly no longer with us... Currently working in the medical sector my fellow engineers think im mad just because I have test card C on my monitor, most don't know what it is or what it is for. Fav tellies were Bush T20 and Fergi 3 and half thousands!

Admin Reply:

Hi, Thank you for your comments. I'm pleased to know that this website has stirred fond memories of the good old days of early colour television. You are not alone in your interest as there are many kindred folk and ex trade engineers still with us here at Radios-TV. As you can see from my collection many of these sets have been repaired and continue to give superb service almost 50 years later. I often wonder what the design engineers would think if they knew the sets they designed, would still be appreciated and used in the 21st Century. OK some love their 60" OLED flat panels and good luck to them, me? Nothing beats sitting by the fire in front of a 25" CTV at Christmas, watching a Morecambe & Wise special with a few nibbles.

Catkins wrote on October 20, 2015 at 4:22 am

There seems to be a lot of ex-repairs engineers on this site. Your post has piqued one of my long running questions, "what killed the repairs industry"? My assumption has always been it was increasing reliability of sets coupled with increasing integration (so to repair a tv meant replacing the entire logic board which wasn't economical). It would be interesting to hear the real reasons from the horses mouth so to speak.

A little bit of background may be of interest. I got interested in the electronics of radios/tvs as a child in the late 70s. At that time in my small town there was a well known TV repair man, and there were others in the other towns nearby. I must have been the typical annoying kid asking him lots of questions. I got lots of bits off a retired repairman I got to know too at the time (pester is more likely the word).

Fast forward a couple of years to 1984 when I got to the age when I was thinking about what to do to earn a living. Repairing TVs etc seemed an interesting thing to do, and it was then I looked around and discovered all the repair shops had simply disappeared. As usual I was busily getting on with life during that time and I'd not noticed, and so I still don't know when in the interval from ~1979 - 1984 it happened.

Having noticed this we (my brother and myself) during the summer holidays of 1984 put an ad in the local paper offering to repair valve radios, in hindsight a silly thing to do, and probably breaking lots of regulations (but we were young and didn't know any of that). It was very successful especially because being naive we only asked asked for a bit more than cost price. As usual things went pear shaped due to us being well meaning in a again naive way. We got a set which needed the power section to be extensively reworked due to the lack of suitable replacement parts. The reworked power section worked perfectly, but we naively left the original circuit in place disconnected (so the set could be put back to the original design when/if the parts became available). The owner seeing the disconnected parts reconnected them somehow, blew the set up and that was the end of our repair adventures.

frank humphris banbury oxon uk wrote on October 3, 2015 at 4:29 am

Hi from Frank,

Yes the 4000 was a big pain, one problem was the then new thick film high wattage resistors used. You could get a set working on the bench, give it to a rep to install and 30 min's later a phone call to say the set installed at Mr xxxx is dead on arrival. Remove the back and find a nice pile of film resistors on the bottom of the cabinet.

We as engineers always carried a spare TV set with us if going to a 4k knowing we will have to bring it back to the workshop for a long job.

P.S. Any TV engineers out there radio hams? My call-sign back in the 80's
was G8THG. I would talk to fellow TV engineers between repair jobs. Anyhow best 73's see you all soon now, M0BJN.

frank humphris banbury oxon uk wrote on September 30, 2015 at 5:21 am

Hi from Frank an Ex multi-broadcast engineer from the 1980's. Great to see the old pics, I started work for multi from school aged 16 in 1974 as a trainee TV engineer. £16.00 per week, I worked through the ranks, TV3, TV2, TV1 and finally ADV Tech five years on. Great times, great sets I remember the 2K, 3K, 3.5K, 4K, 8K and 9K etc. Plus then the new vhs recorders, lots of memories keep up the good work.

Admin Reply:

Hi Frank, Welcome and thank you for your comments. So glad a lot of Ex TV engineers are making it to the shores of this site and finding all the brochures and repair logs from my workshop, stir fond memories of days in the trade. My favourite chassis to work on is the 3K / 3.5K . I note you mention the 4000, not a lot of people mention this chassis, I heard it was a bit of a pain. Hardly any survive now, I only know of one in a private collection. Hopefully one day I will find an example to add to my Thorn stable. By the way have a read of all the articles in the You might find Trade Tales and interesting section, lots of TV engineers have sent in their stories. You might find them amusing if not all too familiar.

peter wrote on July 24, 2015 at 1:06 am

Hello from Pete.
Thank you for a great site. As an ex engineer, since the early sixties I have great memories and fondness for television of the pre plasma, LCD days. I have been employed by the larger T.V. companies of the time, Radio Rentals, Dixons (Dixserve),Mastercare, Currys, Comet and various smaller local stores. I particularly appreciate the internal photographs of the equipment, rather than, as most sites, just the front appearance. All of the site is well thought out, well implemented and lots of fascinating stories and tips from other engineers. Now retired and living in Cape Town I have lost all my old contacts but still like to keep myself busy as an hobby when possible.

Admin Reply:

Hi Pete, thanks for the wonderful compliments re the site, I'm glad it hits the spot for you and others. These comments are appreciated and make the effort invested worth while.