Someone came in and said “ere ya go, was going to dump it, wanit?” Feeling rather sorry for the early ‘70s Thorn portable TV, I thought a Spanish bin would be a rather undignified end. So, as a bit of light relief from earning thousands of Euros a day repairing sophisticated electronics equipment, I would have a little play.
Off with the back and a quick look to see that all was present. Powered the set up with current limiting in place and no nasty pops or smoke. Good. Raster appeared after a while but even at full mains, the image was twisted and undulating with hum bars. Main smoothing capdensor was almost open circuit so thought ah, great, easy job! Nope. Replaced cap and we had a better raster but small and out of focus. A quick look around the power supply showed the 12V supply was low and the series regulator transistor was hot. Luck would have it, I had something that was more or less fit for replacement. Now we had a full size screen and background noise. I noticed the mechanical tuner has fallen to bits, with all the plastic bushes having turned to dust. I only wanted one push button to work well enough to be able to tune the set in to a signal from a modulator. With careful use of various size nuts and tie wraps, it was working, but not pretty.
Fed a lovely signal into the tuner from a UHF modulator connected to a free view box and had a picture of sorts, but seemed to come and go, as if the signal was varying or the AGC wasn’t working. I remember years ago having an AGC fault with one of these chassis and it was nightmare to fix. As luck goes, I found a broken solder connection on a connector, probably my doing after swinging the chassis – PCB up trying to remove the tuner. All good. A clean up and sit down to watch The Professionals.
What, not rushed off your feet then 😎