Юность 401 Television Russian USSR Built 1976 

Hello from Bulgaria, We are very familiar with these TV sets and component packages :) I'll try to explain some things that you are doubting in the video. The earphone jack is non standard type well not any western standard it's a bit larger than 2.5mm and smaller than 3.5mm it's something in between used only in the soviet union. The antenna connectors look odd and different but they are standard, try and you'll see that they are perfectly fitting the modern antenna connectors. The big transistor on the large heatsink is as you properly guessed about the end of the video a DC voltage regulator. This TV works completely on 12 volts and when powered from the mains the's a transformer, rectifier, filter caps and a linear voltage regulator (series type) to 12 volt DC. That's the reason that it consumes almost twice the battery consumption when mains powered. The thing next to the flyback transformer in the white plastic box is as you guessed a tripler with three selenium stacks inside. All small transistors with metal colored shiny packages are a germanium transistors. They have no issues from aging (including whisker issue), they are in perfectly operating condition without any significant change in parameters till these days. Those which are painted in black paint (couple of those seen on the video) are a silicon. The power transistors are also germanium PNP type. The aluminium cylinders with radial leads are all electrolytic capacitors. 50мкф stands for 50 micro farads. Most of the axial leaded aluminium cylinders are paper-wax capacitors. The "weird" inductor close to the flyback is a horizontal linearity adjustment it has a permanent magnet next to it which can be moved for adjustment I believe that american TV sets were using the same principle. I don't know if it will synchronize to 60 Herz field frequency NTSC with or without any adjustments. The horizontal frequency is also a bit different but would cause probably less problems. I'll try with my Yunost (Youth) with a computer video card generated NTSC signal to see will it synchronize. The 401 model has only VHF tuner installed in the factory. The 401Д has the UHF tuner installed also. So this one in the video has only the VHF and the connectors and switches for UHF but the tuner is optional and obviously not installed. The VHF band is divided in 12 channels. See this article for the frequencies in USA and eastern Europe: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_channel_frequencies (the Yunost uses the eastern European standard). I see that there are coinciding frequencies on some channels so you can feed some signal from old VHF modulator. Also there is a fine tuning ring around the channel selector. The IF frequency of the set is 35 MHz (system D) and 6.5 MHz sub-carrier for the audio (system K). So I see the probable way to feed a proper signal to the set with a computer video card with TV out and an old VHF modulator. The TV card supports any standard including PAL D and with the modulator you can feed it to the set. A hint about the set: the radial electrolytics on the board are more likely to be bad. They are manufactured in Armenia (in Yerevan) and are causing problems after these years. They are developing a leakage (electrical) (or in other cases dry out and lose capacitance) and the circuit stops operating properly. So when you power it up if there are any problems keep in mind that a lot of these capacitors have to be replaced maybe. About powering up - the mains cable is plugging into the four pin socket on the back, and only two pins are used, you can easily find which of them. I hope that I have helped with this and feel free to ask any questions that you may have in the restoration process and signal feeding. Best wishes.

I live in a former Soviet country and have been trying to restore a few of these small B/W sets from the 70s and 80s. The unit you have is remarkably clean inside for its age.

I am damn impressed with the quality of that set. I would never have thought that they would put that great of attention to detail on a simple black and white television.

I so love the over enginering on that set. Built to last, no cheap enginering there.

You open a TV and you travel in time and culture... amazing.

This was fascinating. I can easily imagine that this is pretty much what it would feel like to open up a flying saucer and examine technology from another planet.

They must be damn rare in USA, here in Europa they still pop up sometimes. I am a big fan and collector of russian electronics !

That thing is built like a nuclear submarine. Damn. Very cool. Would love to see it running.

'Look at the size of that rectifier!' (repeat x3)

In US movies they tend to ridicule the Russia tech but it seems that they made some really hig quality electronics.

SECAM was Europe's first colour TV standard; it was used in the USSR because it was completely incompatible with PAL. It requires more band space that PAL, but doesn't suffer from colour losses associated with phase error. This set, being B/W, should be able to work with both PAL and SECAM.

I love all of your videos , I'm just starting to get into this hobby and I've learned lots just from watching your videos.

It will accept 110v! Soviet components are crude but durable. Soviet plastics, however, are very brittle and fragile. Really nice set!

Really really cool set! You can tell that consumerism had nothing to do with that thing's design. Built like tank! Please do a power up as soon as you can!

I am Russian and I thought i would leave some information. The TV is "named" (big letters on top) Yoonost (youth). This is kind of like a trademark, but since in USSR everything was government owened there would be no companies, but they always came up with tacky little names for products. The number after the name is the model, so there were older and newer variations with the same "name". Everything in the set would be soviet produced, and the Soviet Union had actually invented their own transistor which is slightly different from the american transistor, because they refused to take imports even though it meant a delay in catching up, and becoming solid state like the rest of the world.

Since I know some Russian, I can help you understand the functions of the controls: Юность - means youth. "YU-NISTS" Контр - short for contrast - Конраст - same as English Громк - short for volume control - Громкость - "GROM-KISTS" - Loudness ЯРК - short for brightness control - Ярукость - "YUR-KISTS" ВКЛ - short for 'switch on' - Включение - "f-KLUCH-CHENNIE"

That workmanship is so refreshing. You very rarely see that outside of industrial and super high end applications anymore. It's sad how far backwards we've gone with penny pinching in an overly inflated economy.

When I worked as an apprentice tv repair man back in the early 1970's. Our colour tv setsthat we worked on at the time, were made for the rental market. Most back then couldnot afford to buy a colour set, because they were expensive. What I remember most about the ones we had was, that internally, the set was made up of many individual circuit boards, rather than one main motherboard, as on this Russian set. The idea behindthis was that, when a field engineer went out to fix one. Whatever the problem was witha faulty tv, the offending circuit board could be unplugged removed, and replaced withoutthe need for fault finding at the clients home. Then the faulty board was brought back tothe shop for repair. This saved the field engineer having to identify and fix the fault atthe persons home, thus saving on time and inconvenience. I believe the sets we usedback then were made by Thorn. Does anyone else remember them?

i worked for mastercare in the 80's and we used to repair russian vega tvs and they were military quality although getting parts was difficult

I found that exact model TV in an old abandoned garage. It was sitting there for 20+ years. I took it home, cleaned off the dust from the inside, plugged it in and it worked just fine. You can run it from mains (220V here in germany) or use a special battery-pack. With the long antenna you had a pretty good reception, before they shut off the analog TV here. Back in the GDR and the USSR all consumer products were built like a tank and were easy to service, because they were expensive and they did not make enough for all the people. You would not just buy a new one, because there were no new ones available, so you fixed it or have it fixed. I like to repair old stuff from that era, because you can do everything yourself quite easily.

never seen a Russian TV, I only see cassette players, or radios, as Selena, but they still look pretty. Their look is a reason for which I started to like electronics.

That really is a very nice TV! So clean on the inside and so massively overengineered. And we used to make fun of the Soviets back in the day saying that they had inferior products than the U.S. This TV is way better than any Philco ever was. Very, very interesting to see.

Btw it looks like the whole set was designed around the packages of parts available. As if there might have been only one type of package available for each component. The workmanship ship is very good. Especially the flip down board

Really Impressive set, Well built,good quality ,nice collector piece.

In the USSR, channel 2 used a video carrier frequency of 59.25 MHz. You will likely have to adjust the fine tuning to obtain the best picture. You will not have any sound, as the TV expects the audio carrier to be 6.5 MHz above the video carrier. The audio carrier may, in fact, lead to severe interference to the picture.

well done the TV, better than they do in America,

28:19 At the bottom it is written: Price 280 Rub. In 1976, 1 Rub. was $ 1.31. Calculate the price of it. ($366.8 !!!)

I miss the МЛТ resistors so much :( So much easier to just directly read values instead of color-coding...

Nice wire weave / dressing. 👍🏻

Those bridge diodes remind me of some military grade ones I've seen at bgmicro as surplus stock and those where rated at 20 amps each. Very interesting video ty

This is a very well built set. CCCP is Russian. That rectifier is huge ! Those transistors could be Germanium. Those boards are very clean. Interesting that some information is bi-langual and some not.

I'm surprised how over built this thing is they spared no expense on parts and workmanship.

halfway through I was like TURN IT ON TUN IT on .

Astonishing quality, like something that one would expect from NASA

Very beautiful TV set I love it👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

well built!!!!!

What I have saw at the back of the TV is that it can operate on 110, 127, 220, and 237 volts of electricity. We had an imported Stereo which can operates on four voltages, same as what that TV has, but the tricky part is you need a cord and an adapter to plug on the pins. The pins corresponds to the voltages you want to operate the set and if you made a wrong connection on the pins to the mains, you might damage the set if you plugged the set on the wrong voltage.

That TV looks to be made of some pretty heavy duty stuff. Lots of Russian made military surplus electronics are popular with hobbyists.

It sure would have been interesting to see this set powered up.

I love the wiring harnesses. There's nothing as nice as the hand tied looms.

It's not cccp as you spell it. It is cyrillic letter and transform it in Latin english it said SSSR or soviet union.

It's said as Junost. The headphone jack is probably 2,5mm if I remember correctly. It was the military organisation (OTK) that permitted those units for sale.

Shango do another video on this one power it up cool set!

Its brand in english is Youth 401

Hi from the UK. In the 70's the USSR was exporting a lot of Hifi and Tv equipment to us. The Cyrillic on the front is probably Rigonda which was the brand name they were sold under here in the UK. Its a good job you didn't power it up as on a mains A/C supply, Whole it has different voltages, its only for a 50Hz Mains supply so it wouldn't have liked your USA 60Hz mains frequency. The UHF/VHF TV Receiver was known as a Dual standard TV. We had them here in the UK for years, primarily UHF at 625 lines was for BBC 2 and BBC 1 and ITV was VHF 405 lines. Somewhere there must be a switch to move between VHF and UHF. The outer ring of the channel changer is probably for VHF channels and the inner ring will be the UHF Tuner Its quite likely also operable on 12Volts DC so you could use it on a boat or in a car or caravan. The Mains Voltages across Europe could vary say between 110 and 240 volts A/C but always at 50Hz

That is the best build quality I have ever seen. Simply insanely over-engineered for durability.

During late 70's, the UK had an influx of Russian made 'RIGONDA' TV's and radios. Made by 'Mashpriborintorg' as I recall. I had a 9" B/W set, 'Rigonda Starlet' that had a chassis almost exactly the same as this set above, but externally quite different. One thing I remember--It had a razor-sharp and excellent picture in comparison with all the British portable TV junk and cheapo Chinese crap around! It had UHF tuner and 625 line, 6MHz sound chassis for UK market.

Here in the UK we had the Russian sets and the very first one was a tiny portable set, i think it was a 7" battery and mains set, and yes it was i pig to get a sound out of it without a picture, well done.

Man hope you pull this out again some day and do a power up video on it.

That's an impressive set, wax string bundling wires, extra heavy duty.

I like your videos because I never saw here in Europe a valve colour TV. Here only the black and white TVs were using tubes, than at the 70's they were black and white and colour TVs at the market but all using transistors.

Beautiful Russian tv set. Also happy new year.

25:55 That's a logo of the Московский радиотехнический завод (Mos-kovs-kij Ra-di-o-teh-nee-ches-kij Za-vod) Moscow Radio-technical Plant where this TV was made.

Czechoslovakia at the time it still existed, was using 220V @50Hz mains, same for Yugoslavia and "Baltic nations". As far as I know only the US and I think also Japan (and some Latin American countries) used and still uses 110V @60Hz mains power. Anyways, great video, also, it's kind of strange to me to watch you being surprised and amazed at something I've seen many times around in various trash yards etc, taking these TVs apart for spare components (as a kid), but at the same time I do understand that you haven't got to see such TVs before as the Eastern Block was very isolated from the rest of the world. Keep up good stuff!

Был в молодости такой, даже до сих пор где то есть))

The Cyrillic script at the top of the set reads (phonetically) Yu-Nost- 401, I believe.

Oh wow! I grew up with this one. I mean.. I'm not that old, we just used one of these in the 90s.

Re phosphor colours, in the UK, I remember a Ferguson 21 inch colour set - earlyish transistor mid 70s of which I had two. One had a dark phosphor appearance, which I thought would be better for blacks, whilst the other had a much lighter colour - not safety glass related. The lighter one gave what seemed a much more vibrant picture? Both tubes were good.

The Russians sure knew how to make a quality tv

Wow, is that thing overbuilt! I've always heard Soviet consumer electronics were very expensive, now I see why.

You really have to find a way to turn this on :D.

Yunost pronounced Yoo nost My ex had one of these that blew up and I carried it out of the apartment in the FSU. The metal scrappers were on it very quickly after I put it in the trash :) The Russians really built their TV's and Stereo equipment out of military parts. They did not like cheap junk stuff... so they really built them.

In east germany, soviet TVs from the Raduga brand very quite common. These were the cheapest colour set you could get. However, they would easily get bad and even burn down due to heat issues.

Ever try powering this one up yet?

Please make a video on powering on this TV and trying to make it display a picture!

Greetings from Germany. The russian letters spell "Junost" (spelled like jew-nost). In the eastern part of gerrmany these sets were very popular due to their low price compared to local products (which would have been RFT), so we still have a lot of those. Another popular TV was the Raduga 706, which was one of the first soviet colour tvs. It was well known for bursting into flames suddenly and having a lot of hard to get tubes.

Seems really clean for it's age.

Soviet Union electronics were usually built extremely well with high quality components because it was made to last, Socialist command economy under Socialism were disgusted upon the very idea of the fact that stuff was made to not last. Soviet light bulbs lasted twice as long as western light bulbs, just an example of this mentality. North Koreans continued to make CRT televisions well into 2016, they made copies of Philips and Sony Triniton, I love to go there and buy a Sony Triniton copy, North Koreans make extremely well made electronics from the video footage I have seen of their factory assembly lines.

ЮНОСТЬ [YUNOST] YUNOSTь ь-soft sign. t-pronounced softly. But without the softening sign "ь" the words do not lose their meaning. There is a dividing soft sign, it is also written "ь", lives in the center of the word)) Without a separator "ь", the word becomes not very clear🍿😺👍 Amazing tv! I like)

That's a really cool set. The simulated wood grain around the face of the CRT is unusual, but then again there's nothing ordinary about this one. Not for us Westerners, anyway.

Привет.эта.наша.саветская.техника.помню.

built Soviet tough. I wonder if they build consumer electronics any more, or is everything from China. Rusmart. love all the wire harness, and major overkill looking power parts. Looks like all precison resistors, I bet the filter caps are good still too.

The jack marked Accum may be short for Accumulator, another term for battery

I have a small portable soviet tv called a "Rigonda". It's turquoise blue, and has the same plate on the back with the lightening bolt symbol and made in USSR. It goes ok but the signal is odd, and even putting an RF into the antenna plug is very wavy and distorted, but it looks cool anyway. Each component inside is really old style and even the speaker has a neat little soviet type logo on it. No idea how it came to be in New Zealand.

I like get used to programmable scientific calculators during my college years and the ones made by Hewlett Packard were the best. When I start seeing Russian calculators on eBay I wonder how they are constructed and worked. I get the two most popular models: the Elektronika Mk-52 and Mk-61 made by 1983 and they were designed on HP logic of operation (Polish notation) and even one resembles them (HP-33E) They are very interesting calculators indeed, used by Russians engineers and students when PCs were not as common, even were sent into space for backup use by cosmonauts. The calculators are somehow rustic and ordinary, using fluorescent green displays that were power hungry, made not as robust in construction to Western standards, the keyboard were very soft but registered ok, also very slow but very reliable and capable, even they come with schematics for repair and they have a guarantee of 24 months based on manufacturing date. That's started my curiosity on Russian electronics. Last month I became interested in getting some portable radios to study them. My first one arrived yesterday and their construction are very good. When politics came in to play we get sometimes the wrong impression from countries and that applies to the former Soviet Union.

This weird jack is neither 3.5mm, nor 2.5mm. It is a special soviet Ш2П connector which was commonly used in headphones and consumer radios. 5-pin DIN connectors were used for linear I/O.

One thing I notice was how large and heavy duty all of the components seem to be,compared with sets made in Japan, Europe and the USA.

"The Baltic states" were three of the 15 Socialist States that made the USSR. Some of the electronics plants that made the TVs like that were located in those Baltic States.

The quality goes in before the CCCP goes on evidently.

Junost, is that the pronunciation? Love those laced wiring looms.

It also has Norelco jacks on the back

I just now found this video. I know it is old but I am totally impressed with the quality in the construction of this set. Dare I say that they were ahead of the curve during the time period they built this? Cool video and again wow nice find. I bet that set will work with minimum problems. Oh and by the way where did you get the adapter for your bt modulator? The 72 ohm video in converted to rca. I can't find that anywhere. I had to home brew a connector. It works put is not a solid connection. Just thought I would ask.

I swore the fuse compartment said 50/60hz. Even though it's on the Secam/palD system and the channels might not line up, would you be able to adjust the vertical and horizontal hold till it lined up for the video signal?

У нас в деревенском доме такой стоял)

looks better quality than most tv sets from the same era!

Wish things were made this well now, New TV good for 3 to 5 years if your lucky, this is built like a tank.

I wish my soviet motorcycle were assembled with so much love back then

Would be cool if you could take it out again and try to turn it on.

at 12.05 its a capacitor k50 series known for going bad 50 microfarad prob 16 or 25 volts ,known for going death short,near is a 200 microf ,the big one, russian use 500 insted off 470 , 200 , int off 220 , 50 ins 47 ,20 ins 22 ,10 is 10 ,5 is 4.7 , 2 ins 2.2 . for ex 200mk 50b is a 220 micro 50 volts

In Soviet Russia, television builds you! This makes me sad. Things aren't built like this anymore. If you buy a TV today, if it doesn't break within three years, it's going to try connecting to a service that is no longer available by then just to interrupt your viewing with pop-up ads. Navigating menus with the remote now takes longer than getting up and using the buttons on the set itself, and then you can't control everything. Sit on the remote and you'll have to throw the TV itself out with it. And if you don't want to pay for more features that distort the picture quality, you'll have to pay more anyway for the ability to even turn such features off. And when people buy a $50 BD player for their $200 TV, they are tricked into buying a $100 HDMI cable as well, with claims of differences in picture quality aspects that mathematically cannot be affected. TV's won't be built like that ever again.

Good old Yunost . O boi my childhood but only we have little eletric tubed white plastic one. (Black and white one). (Hungary)

It's just like American/Japanese/Etc... TV's and radios. They all had some great ideas. They all had some bad ideas. Too bad they couldn't have worked together. Peace.

Ant chance were gonna see a power up on this set? Very interesting

Sad that the Quality went down the Hill like that. Last Year I got a 1976 Telefunken PalColor Set from Work. The Customer used it until 2016. Only the HV Cascade for the Flyback died, that's why I got it. Hopefully I will get some more TVs when they turn off Analog Cable here in Germany this summer. Im not familiar with russian TVs, but actually it was standard that european Sets were built like that, even the small ones were very reliable and service Friendly.

I think there may be one more piece to this circuit. I but there is a circuit on the 12V input that allows it to drive a transformer, such as a squarewave generator in there, than an AC-Only TV would not have.

This is the 401 modell. Which is rare nowadays. The 402 modell was the common modell. Personally I have 6 Junosty Tv-s and only one of them is 401. The problem with these TV-s that the quality of the tubes were not great (even brand new). The Tv I use has great brightness but when i turn it up to a value the edge of the screen gets blurry. Only the center of the screen remains bright and good. To get this Tv workin I reccomend you to use a 12v power supply. If you want to see something on the screen yu have 3 options.I list them as i reccomend them. 1. Get a VHS from Easter Europe that can mix PAL,SECAM and maybe NTSC video. Some of my VHS players can accept NTSC video and audio and tranform them to 50HZ SECAM with OIRT sound (standard Eastern EU sound for radios and TV-s) 2. Send me a private mail and I tell you how to make a composite video mod for this TV. It's not that hard. Many schools used this to convert this "junk of television" to a "monitor" so they can use it IT class for C64 and other computers. Back then Demoscenes for Commodore computer used this TV andy only the rich ones used color TV and even few people used RBG or Commodore branded monitors. (this was in the early 90's and late 80's) 3. The most difficult one. The first is to get a tuner from an other TV and try to make it work. The audio uses the OIRT standard so the easiest way to bypass this is to solder a mono audio jack to the audio potmeter. For some TV-s it doesn't work but luckily it works on this one.

Have seen sets like this

You very well might get a picture. The line rate is very close (15625Hz vs. 15634Hz). Video modulation negative as in USA. Audio won't work, but you might be able to hear the audio by placing a shortwave radio, tuned to 6500kHz, by the set. POWER IT UP!

These were exported to East Germany as the "Junost" brand.

Every elektronic Soviet product at that time was made with the same components and standards. Actually, that TV was very cheap. If you convert to $ at this point, it will be somenting about 35$ new. :D I have a lots of Russian Hi-Fi product and every is built like a tenk! Lot's of gold, silver and paladium inside. I always admire how good they are built!!