You brought back many memories when i was 9 years old with this Zenith set. In 1962 my parents bought a Zenith just like this one. It replaced our old 1949 Hoffman in the living room that ended up going into my bedroom. We were one of the few households with two Televisions in their home. I would stay up late to watch Johnny Carson in my bedroom, but the parents said NO and would turn it off. I would just turn it back on again. My father would then pull a few tubes out of the set and set them aside to disable it. I would then replace them to get the set workin again. After a while I got to know what tubes did what and got familiar with how the TV worked. This started my career in Television. In 1966 my parents bought our first Sears Silvertone Color TV. One of the first color sets with a rectangular screen. I got to upgrade with the Zenith in my bedroom. I kept it going for years until the CRT when bad. I did keep the remote control unit which is a stand alone chassis and used it to control lights and other things. By the time I was in high school I had over 12 tv sets I would collect out of the neighborhood trash and got them all working. I was also the neighborhood TV repair kid. I majored in Television Broadcasting in College and was able to get job at NBC in Burbank California. A job I still have today. My hobby turned into a job. I was very lucky. I loved the old tube days. They were the best and most fun and rewarding. Today all you can do is just swap out boards or in many cases just buy a new TV. They just are not worth the cost of repair. The days of mom and pop TV repair businesses are over.
My TV repair hobby took me to engineering. I didn't choose my career I was captured. It was staring into the vent holes of the radios and TV of my grandparents home. Oh and to Mr. shango066 it was 40KHz range, I remember seeing this in a the in Sams Photofacts
@@vcv6560 there are still a couple mom and pop crt repair places in my area, so their not entirely gone, however I am in a very low income area so everyone keeps their stuff for 20 years
My parents had one a little older, the remote would quit every two to three years. We would go to White Front and I would test the tubes on their self service tube tester, the 5Y3 on the remote was always weak. Replaced and worked again. The guy in the electronics department would get upset because a ten year old was using the tester. I appreciate your videos, they are informative and entertaining.
Alameda Repair Shop i was also about 10 years old when i would go to my local Sav-on-Drugs and use the tube tester. When i would need a tube, they sold them behind the counter next to the cigaretts. This was in the early 1980's!!
@@davidjames666 yup. Always in the tobacco section 😀 you could sneak a smell of apple flavored pipe filer while watching the dials move. Good times as a kid.
My Father was able to do this. Our first color tv came home from the dump. He got the schematics and pulled every board and diagnosed any failed components . That was late seventies or early eighties. Watching you do this brings back memories
A remote control that's powered by the mere force of the user pressing the button and never needs batteries changed! We are living in the future, folks.
Slideshow projectors had "clickers" long before this. They operated a motor inside the carousel and when you released the switch, you could heard the cartridge drop down inside the machine with a "clack."
In 1956, Robert Adler developed "Zenith Space Command," a wireless remote. It was mechanical and used ultrasound to change the channel and volume. When the user pushed a button on the remote control, it struck a bar and clicked, hence they were commonly called a "clicker," but it sounded like a "clink" and the mechanics were similar to a pluck. Each of the four bars emitted a different fundamental frequency with ultrasonic harmonics, and circuits in the television detected these sounds and interpreted them as channel-up, channel-down, sound-on/off, and power-on/off.
I remember we had a Zenith space command set with a channel changer and a "stepped" volume control, but the volume only had three settings, "barely hear it", "normal" and "ear-blasting"
Good diagnosis Shango, thanks for sharing! I bet the servicemen back in the day loved this design when doing house calls. Nothing like getting a physical workout when repairing electronics!
I grew up with one of these. It had a different console, but was basically the same. Ours was probably bought around 1963 or 64. It was the first TV I remember (born in 62). There is a kinda cool feature on those TV's, you may already know of. The little Zenith emblem on the front of the TV is also a mount for the remote to be stored on. On the backside of the remote are slots that slide over the lips on the emblem.
Ultrasonic remotes, ugh. Surprisingly, they were still sold/in use into the 80s. We had installations in corporate and educational facilities that still used them (New!) They became a problem later on as controls got broken, lost, etc. We tried rigging up electronic oscillators to take their place but that did not always work reliably. Probably a tone/duration issue. The remote sensor would also fail. I think some were crystal mics and may have failed from heat or humidity. If you opened up the remote you would find that the "tuning forks" (bars) were adjustable. Woe unto anyone who ran into a system where both the receiver and the remote had been monkeyed with... Keys: Modern keys are often of different metals than 50 years ago. There were more brass and steel keys back then and they were more musical-sounding when jiggled. Aluminum keys that are common today are dead sounding and damp things down when shaken.
In 1961 I was 7 and I loved playing with that very remote. Some friends had one of those brand new TVs so that was a nice place to hang out after school. We called them "clickers" and I've still heard some older people still call remotes that! Fun vid.
Back then obsolescence meant that you replaced an appliance only when it was "morally obsolete" and no longer relevant, not because it broke down after two years of use and there are no parts to fix it.
My dad was an E.E. working for Motorola in Franklin Park during 50s and 60s, worked on things such as 8-track cartridge audio and automotive electronic ignition, cutting edge back then.
Back in 1963, my dad treated our family with a brand new Zenith "roundie". We were the 1st house in the neighborhood to have a color set....and it was Awesome! It also had the the space command and motorized tuner. So with the remote's click/ping!, the "eharrreh" of the tuner and the "chunk chunk" of the Alliance "Tenna Rotator" box, it was a raucous beast. But we loved it!
While in high school, I was a member of a band. While practicing CCR's Proud Mary, in the drummer's living room, we had to unplug his TV because it kept turning on.
I remember when the digital TV came here it had so many problems with bad signal and outages the massive amount of crappy converter boxes didn't help either.
Those 6x9"s were used in some certain AA5 or AA6 Zenith AM table-top type radios with a 50C5 or 35C5 output, give or take 3/4 watt to one of them - and they rocked with that. So a pair of those with a single EL84/6BQ5 pushing a powerhouse 3-4 watts would indeed be quite loud in that huge cabinet of that Zenith. I bet it would sound gooood with those electrostatic tweeties.
The keys thing is ABSOLUTELY TRUE! I used to drive my father NUTS in the 1970s passing through the room and jingling my keys and changing his channel right when he was getting in to watching something. It took him a long time to realize it was me and not a defective TV... LOL! 😂😂😂
My grandparents had a color Zenith console similar to this one. I vaguely remember it working and seeing a similar remote control when I was a young kid in the 80's. Anywho when that console Zenith bit the dust my grandma just threw a table cloth over the dead console tv and put a couple plants and her new plastic wood trimmed late 80s/early 90s box tv on top of it.
I don't understand the eBay prices for the Space Command remotes. Why would someone pay $300 for a remote for a TV that you can hardly give away free? Edit: Electrostatic speakers in a TV? Suddenly you have my attention. They are a capacitor, you have that part right, but they have to have a bias volts applied to make the other signal voltage differential cause sound. I've made electrostatic drivers before, and I'm blown away that a TV came with them. High fidelity, indeed.
Your set is very similar to my Zenith SpaceCommand 400. Mine is a chassis 17B20Q, it is a table top unit with only one speaker. Sadly, mine is in much worse condition. The clicker does not work at all, the tuner does not work and is seized up, I only get a raster with some hum, but I am too lazy to actually dig into it. This video is giving me some inspiration to start digging into it to see if I can get it to function again. Bought it as a project as it was only $25 WITH the original remote, but then once I got it home, I haven't gotten around to it. It deserves some love after watching this. The seller was getting ready to salvage it as there were no interested buyers in it, so, I saved it at least.
That is the same type TV and remote Archie Bunker had in his house. Even on one show the set chassis was gone to the shop for repair and Archie comes in and sits down and says 'where's the guts to my tv?' All it showed was a cabinet just like that one with four speakers and everything else was gone.
My parents bought a Zenith Space Command TV in the early 60s. It was a 19 inch black and white unit. They paid $500 for it. That was a lot of money back then.
growing up my parents had a 21" Dumont tv Hi Fidelity with an 8" woofer and one of those electrostatic tweeters. when my parents sold the TV I absconded with it before the people came to pick it up!
You went a bit beavis and butthead with the remote at the start. Great video though and a very interesting old TV. Cheered me up on a Monday afternoon. Hope part two is not too far off. I am playing with a 1974 Riga radio made in old soviet union I am trying to decide why it has a massive buzz on AM that other AM radio near it does not have, both are running on battery, FM works fine and quiet on aux input.
Holy crap, sixty cents per KwH in your area? Here in southeast Michigan the base rate for electricity is about 10 cents per KwH! When I was a kid my aunt and uncle had one of these sets. The remote always amazed me at the time, mid 1960's.
Feel really lucky to live here in Tacoma, where I pay about 9 to 11 cents a kilowatt/hr. depending on time of day for electricity. I remember this was the first remote tv we had (hand me down from Grandpa) circa 1964-65. I was glad to be off channel change/tune duty after the introduction of the remote control. My curiosity about the remote control and our home tube radio sparked my lifelong love and interest in electronics! Far out Shangoo, very cool!
I'm sure two guys delivered that set when new. But if it ever needed to be serviced, the 65 year old chain smoking service man, nearing the end of his exciting radio/TV service career, probably wasn't pulling that chassis with out a helper. Looking forward to seeing some evicted bumble-bombs.
friend had one of those ultrasonic remote sets in the 80's. It was later than this one, since it was transistorized. the remote had a transistor oscillator in it instead of the tuned bars that it struck. Every time his dog would scratch, the jingling of the dog tags would cause it to change channels, or turn on/off
We had one of these TV's with the ultrasonic remote control in the late 60's/early 70's. We used to throw keys up in the air and let them hit the carpet, it would either change the channel or turn the set off. LoL
Haha, back in the early '90s, my grandparents had given me their old wood-grain-colored plastic-cased RCA with this kind of remote control, probably from the later '60s or early '70s, and one day I was just clinking a handful of quarters back and forth, and then I heard the channel dial on that TV spin-click a time or few, and I was like, "Huhh, what?" And then I discovered that I could do it again and again! So then I opened the remote control up and watch it work, and went, "AHHHH, that explains this!"
That arrangement that allows the coarsly- controlled induction motor to drive the tuner in a stepped fashion is known as a "Geneva Drive" or "Geneva Machanism". Great little bit of 19th century tech they used there.
The old clicker remote tv. They sure invented it well back then for a battery-less remote.......& that beautiful wooden cabinet....certainly no crap chipboard! Can’t wait for part 2, Shango. Love always, Corinna xoxo
I remember going to our neighbors home to look at their brand new remote controlled Zenith. So futuristic, incredible, what will they think of next . Change channels, change volume all from your couch.
I agree Philhalo66. even tho I don't always know what each and every part shango66 is alluding to does, I still find it fascinating. and I almost always have a good laugh at something he says too! I'm learning and being entertained at the same time. what more could you ask??
Somebody having nothing else to do could make a remote control relay box for that. A thing that would receive the ultrasonic blurps and translate them into IR pulse trains. Bonus exercise: Use AI signal processing, train a network that can reliably recognize the signal. Those hardwood trees are all gone now. Even in the rainforest.
That method of sonic control is interesting. I think the US had wire free remote control sets before we did in the UK, but the only ultrasonic sets I saw (in the mid to late 70's) used electronic remotes with a transducer in, rather than mechanical. They soon gave way to infra red. I think they ran at 40 KHz. Really enjoyable watch, looking forward to part 2
We grew up watching TV like that my neighbors had one for years something very close to this matter of fact that used it for many years and then they gave it to the people next door to to them who used it for many years
I really don't understand the association with wood being "quality" It's made out of wood because that was the only option back then. There is nothing inherently better about wood other than it's perceived as better today. In fact wood has a few downsides, like it warps, rots, and decays away over time. And just because modern TVs are made of plastic doesn't mean they can't outlast an old TV like this. I don't see why they wouldn't. They're made out of plastic which lasts forever, There are no moving parts, and no electrical components to go bad. Everything about a modern TV is technically better than this. The picture quality, the sound quality, the size, weight, efficiency, convenience. etc... So what exactly do you mean when you say they don't make "quality" stuff like this anymore?
As a kid in the 70's I used to get old TV's to take apart. The old models often had a complete service-manual tucked away inside the box, with circuit-diagrams, photos of the boards, and even oscilloscope screen-grabs etc. So it definitely wasn't a question of IF anyone would have to open it up and service it, but WHEN.
At 38:25 anyone else surprised that the chassis has a lot of disk caps and maybe has less than a couple dozen of them? Those older tvs man they usually have LOADS AND LOADS of caps. a Philco 50T1403 was a NIGHTMARE underneath, that set had at least 35-40 capacitors, not to mention a good 5-6 electrolytic can caps with 3-4 a piece! After all that I just called it 🤣
I had a 25 in. Zenith B&W set with the Space Command Remote. The picture quality was top notch, but the remote was kind of clunky (no pun intended). Not terribly reliable. As I recall, the remote did not turn on the tv. The buttons control channel up/down, volume, and mute. Almost forgot.... Zenith's motto was "The quality goes in before the name goes on."
You can swap out those dinger bars, so you could remove one from your other handset and assemble one remote that will work all the functions on that receiver. The button you're missing from the Space Command 400 on your Space Command 300 handset is just MUTE, so you aren't going to be doing without any important functionality.
cool video, looking forward to part 2. I have taken to watching you tube like this more than reg TV the content on shango066 is WAY better than the garbage on cable.
PSA for non-repairsmen watching this: The chassis of a TV is often connected to mains. Never touch any metal parts on the inside, while the set is plugged in.
@C Burgess 'Hot' means 'live at mains voltage', not necessarily 'at high temperature'. The hot bits (valves, power resistors) are mounted away from the wooden cabinet. Sometimes with asbestos or metal heat shields. Generally, when a component burns out, the TV stops working so people will turn off or unplug the TV, possibly smell the smoke of burning electrics, so fire risk is minimized.
I was a child in the 1960s and the remotes were fun to play with... Sometimes the more channels would go by too fast and you had to go all the way around the channels again. Also, my father had a big keychain with many keys, and he could make the channels go around by shaking his keys...
Hi Shango, I imagine you have gotten a glut of comments similar to what I am going to tell you. You mentioned how the tv could be controlled by jingling keys or other things. Years ago My cousin Molly had a a zenith color set with a remote (something new to me, even in the mid 70's.) Her brother Terry and I were messing around playing with some of her baby Heather's toys, she had this big red wind up apple. Something in the windup works caused the frequency you mentioned and the channels would start flipping every time we wound it up and let it go. We thought it was really odd, I guess we always thought that stuff ran on an infra red or the same principal as an automatic garage door or an optical security alarm. I included a link to the apple as well. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xAV9I3LH2Ts.html Thanks again for another entertaining video.
perhaps you could use a recording of that apple to see if it has any effect on your tv.. maybe some of the other comments too, would be interesting to see... maybe even some sort of tone generator may find the right pitch/frequency to make it work.
I own an 1962 Wells-Index milling machine, and you're right, they had quality in mind.. 2019, and I'm making parts with it, any repairs I've made to it are due to user error or loading / unloading damage. Built like a tank.
My step father had a TV set back in the early 80s that would change channels when jingling the keys in front of it.. I don't remember the type of set it was, but I thought it was a bit more modern than this one, but I could be wrong. I was only 4 or 5 years old at the time..
