Ex TV Engineers

[Neanderthal]

Hello. I was a domestic TV engineer from 1952 to 1980. I'm sure there are many ex engineers on the forum. I invite discussion on various topics regarding TV engineering and share experiences from both field and bench work. Strange faults, amusing events, DX TV and whole lot more that made up the life of a TV engineer, and you could say we're a breed that's now virtually died out.

[ms660]

Yep, for my sins I was a TV engineer, but I'm better now...1964 to 1986, not taken the back off a telly since, don't want to either.

Lawrence.

[Neanderthal]

Hi Lawrence. I got out of the TV trade in 1981, then worked on the markets selling haberdashery until retirement in 2000. You did well to stay until 1986, TVs were well on the way to becoming computers by then. The last one I dismantled was a couple of years ago when someone fly tipped an enomous tube TV on my allotment. Beastly job, but got a little scrap out of it, at least there was a degaussing coil, plus the scanning yoke.
I don't watch much TV now, I find so many pictures out of focus, not to mention dark and murky scenes. Reckon we've known better times.
Mike.

[ms660]

Certainly lots of changes, when I started it was almost all valves in TV's, the first hybrid I worked on was the Bush TV135 I seem to remember.

405/625 sets became popular back then, all them grotty system switches.

Cheap and nasty EHT CRT connectors (until the Japs came along)

A tin of Duraglit and tube of silicone grease used to last about a month on call outs, Carbon Tet that used to dissolve the colour code on resistors as one of the side effects, Electrolube pens were reluctantly handed out by the stores on a kind of "sign here" basis.

Then there was the customers, the poorest to the wealthy, sticky carpets to mansions, I found that the worst customers were the self made types.

High rise flats with busted lifts...lugging big tellys up and down all them stairs, interesting graffiti to read though.

Lots of funny times as well, a fair few laughs.

Then colour TV came along, mass exit of the bottle changers, the rest learned, adapted and survived, me included.

Done field and bench, preferred bench in one way, less hassle. Preferred field in another way, free vehicle to take home and have fun in.

Worked for a few including some of the rental outfits, Fred Dawes, White & Swales, RTR North West, Granada, Telefusion, Visionhire, Yeoman & Russell, Rumbelows, Radio Engineering services, ETS and Sony.

When I left the trade in 1986 ITT had not long brought out their first digital TV's.

I didn't quit the trade because of the technological changes that were taking place, I always thrived on that, I quit mainly because of moaning customers and having to drive around like a looney to get all the call outs done, in the end I used to fill in a pile of out cards in advance, park up the road and deliver them quietly on tip toe, naughty boy ? to be honest it got to the stage where I didn't give a rats, I'm sure I wasn't alone.

Lawrence.

[Mike Phelan]

From when I left school in 1961 until 1980. I started with a company called Foyles Furnishing in Bath, then moved north when I was 21.
Worked at a place called Warrington Electric in the said town, then Melody House in Leigh where we also repaired electronic organs and were a Hammond dealer.
I left there to go to British Relay and then colour appeared! Became a supervisor then, moved to a company called Focus whoo were owned by Mercantile Credit; they then joined up with Radio Rentals and Multibroadcast, becoming part of the Thorn empire.
Last few years I was teaching engineers about difficult video (N1500, 1700, VHS, Grundig 2 x 4 and Betamax) problems.

Then a strange thing moved me to software design but that's OT. Retired in 2009 and still cannot resist playing with vintage radio gear!

[Junk Box Nick]

Not in the trade myself but I knew a lot of TV repairmen in the late 70 and 1980s. I heard hideous stories of some the properties they visited. "The picture problem was solved when I got out a damp cloth and wiped over the screen...".

I got to know the best sets for avoiding TVI from my amateur radio installation and suggested these to my parents who became renters when they finally ditched the 1960s Philips Dual Standard - which was hopeless on 625 so only ever used on 405 - and we finally got colour. I seem to remember that the Ferguson AX (or TX??) was well regarded back then. I could happily chat away using 100watts on 15 and 20m.

The trade seemed to die with the demise of the hired TV. The last guy that I knew stuck it out until about 2006-7 but, by then mortgageless, was ticking over part time repairing CRT computer monitors, though they were rapidly becoming uneconomical to repair. Next I knew he'd packed it in, downsized, and gone to the coast.

[ms660]

Warrington wasn't that far from where I lived back then, my mate worked for Focus up around those parts.

Used to do a lot of recons as well, the area/service managers were on some sort of figure bending scam, a lorry used to turn up at the workshop full of colour tellies, mainly thorn for reconditioning, we could only change a LOPTX or CRT with Gods permission, when done we used to soak them for a day or so and if all was well put a sticky label on the back, date, branch or depot number, engineers name etc.

A lorry would turn up and take them away, I once asked where they were going "Eastleigh mate" fair enough (I was in Cornwall)

A few weeks later another lorry arrived with tellies to recon, a good number of them looked in really good condition, not surprising really I had only reconditioned them a few weeks prior, they had never been out on rental during that time, that happened often.

Lawrence

[lesmw0sec]

I was a student doing radio & TV at Bournemouth Tech. We had a number of receivers for practical fault finding tests. A favourite trick was to sneak back during break and wire a magnesium flash bulb across a victim's heater chain. You can imagine the reaction at switch-on!

[ms660]

We used to do spider sparks...

1" length of multi strand cable, strip three quarters off, fan out individual strands, drop into the back of a telly when an engineer was engrossed in fault finding.

Lawrence.

[_Clint_]

I was too a 'repair man' oddest thing is I had about 6 ICL PC Monitors (I used to fix about 20 a month on average) over a few months for the MET Police for 'alignment' nothing much wrong with them but went through them and thought no more. I started to see the same ones coming back then complaints the faults were not fixed. I asked for more information on the next one.
Next one comes in user says its tinged with Pink, it was very slightly off in colour but not that I would complain about but hey ho, I twiddled and sent it back. a few days later the same one was on my bench with the same issue and a very annoyed user. Someone up top was getting a bit fed up so I thought I would make sure it didn't happen again thinking it was some intermittent thing and swap the innards over with another monitor which I did and sent it back.
I get a phone call, engineer has just refitted the monitor and it has the same issue, must be the base unit then I said, however they had already changed that out as well.
I was asked to attend site a Police station inside Heathrow Airport, inside the office I saw the monitor and hell it was seriously Pink, a bit curflumpxed I stepped back and looked around and EVERY monitor was pink. Looking outside the window I could see not 100yds away a radar tower....

I ended up aligning every monitor on site !!!

Not much of a fix I know but an odd one.

[dsergeant]

And some of us are not even 'ex' TV engineers - I started when I got made redundant from Ferranti in 1994 (where I was a real Engineer, but that is another story...) working self employed. Good in the early days but has got more and more difficult now with most things either BER or board swapping which gives no satisfaction. Now officially retired as I get my state pension, still get things brought to me to get mended.
Just about remember the days when UHF tuners had valves in them, it was certainly far better in those days.
Dave

[HamishBoxer]

I statred in the trade in 1962 through to 2006 and have still done repairs since then on Plasma and LCD etc despite retired.

Old engineers never die though perhaps there emission fades!

[ITAM805]

Although not a TV serviceman, I worked in the trade at a service department in the early 70's. From the workshop in Greenwich we serviced customers of a couple of shop chains in SE London, Kingsons and Keating & Miskin, although my wageslip had British Relay on it! My job was basically muscle, picking up the faulty sets and leaving a loan set with the customer until they were fixed and were returned.

One of the perks of this job (apart from having a brand new Transit for personal use - handy for a gigging guitarist!) was that we had the latest colour TV's indoors - a different one almost every night, most homes were still B&W back then! Trinitrons were the hot property at the time although I preferred the Hitachi models. There where some truly awful sets around I recall, particularly the big 2 man lifting jobs - awful picture where the convergence always looked out to me, even when new out of the box!

[Neanderthal]

Hello to all and many thanks for the replies. Yes Lawrence, I remember those EHT connectors, could give the unwary quite a nasty poke. Carbon Tet. Yes, I worked for Radio Rentals for a while and we were issued with gallons of the stuff. Wish I could get it now. OK on the flats, fortunately I was mostly rural so didn't have that problem, although there was one estate with no vehicular access, that was a long carry.

Mike, you mentioned RR. I wonder if you ever came across that audio fault where the cathode bias cap went OC (Dalys were famous for it). The result was a deafening howl which could only be silenced by turning the set off. Easy fault to fix, but it scared the kids, and failed to amuse the customer.

OK on Dual Standard sets Nick. They really were a pain in most cases, and the day when everything went 625 could not come fast enough.

Bet that flash bulb trick caused some laughs. Does anyone remember the awful stink a burnt out selenium rectifier made? Couldn't blame the dog in a service department!

Pink monotors eh? Just goes to show how external things can cause problems. I had a similar incident when ITA engineers were playing with the aerals, but that one for another time.

You did well to adapt to servicing plasma sets GM8JET. I was never enamoured with them, although I coped with colour, and even built a decoder to fit into an American NTSC set. Today I use chips in homebrew projects, but only on a limited basis. I would like to go in for restoration, have not the space here. I became self employed in 1967, and that's when the fun started.

Out cards. Puts me in mind of one boss I worked for who had a frustrating customer he could see was asleep in his chair and no amount of knocking would wake him. When my boss returned after a fruitless call, I asked whether he went back later.

"No," he said. "I turned his milk indicator round to 6 pints and left."

[Marconi_MPT4]

Originally Posted by lesmw0sec

I was a student doing radio & TV at Bournemouth Tech...

If I recall, rooms used were B19 with all the equipment, sets etc and B22 for principles lectures. Many lecturers were still teaching (some past retirement) until the City and Guilds course at Bournemouth/Poole was discontinued in the mid eighties. Some were also licenced amateurs who taught budding hams to take the C&G RAE.

I have never seen a trade die so quickly but left the job in the late eighties and moved into what was left of the electronics industry, where companies sponsored further training for HNC then degree. For me working in the Radio and TV trade were the best years.

Cheers
Rich

[Nuvistor]

It was 1962 to 1981 for myself, I did not see a future in it and left the trade. I certainly enjoyed the job and the customers were great on the whole. We had no rentals all purchased until the last couple of years but not many of those.

I went to fixing computers, the ones with disk drives the size of washing machines, and processors in 19 inch racks. From there in the late 1990's to IP networking and server admin.

I have probably been lucky, enjoyed the jobs I had, and only moved 3 times till retirement.
Frank

[HamishBoxer]

I do remember when working for DER Ltd if the customer would not pay, the reps would stick a pin through the aerial coax.Customer put in service call and we went out and said workshop job.

Next day they would ring and ask when is the set coming back!

[Phil G4SPZ]

I'm not an ex-TV engineer myself, but I know several. They all claim to have enjoyed the job immensely!

[G6Tanuki]

I never really did any 'TV' engineering; I was much more "the RF-guy the TV-technicians passed the problem to for interference issues".

The 1970s through the late-1980s were full of TVs which had truly woeful immunity to the ever-growing number of CB/police/taxi/coastguard/ambulance/military/amateur transmissions. There was a certain MoD network whose second-harmonic emissions could totally swamp TV reception in the upper-end of the UHF channels (where the first-generation of Germanium-transistor tuners already had gain/image-selectivity issues). I deployed quite a few coax quarter-wave-stub filters to take-out this particular problem.
"Naughty" AM CB interference to UHF TV was dealt with by prescribing a ~braid-breaker~ two windings of a couple of turns of thin wire through a binocular ferrite-core, fitted in an aluminium 35mm film-can with a coax socket one end and a flylead-with-plug the other. I got the film-cans free by the hundred from a friend in the photo-developing business!
Cost to me less than a quid; I charged these back to the various TV-rental companies at more like £25 a visit - they were happy to pay up rather than have the customer cancel a lucrative rental agreement for a TV+VCR because "it keeps stopping working".

[Nuvistor]

The thread is about TV engineers but probably most of us worked with radios, hifi' sets. It was an interesting time for me. VHF FM was just getting started and then stereo transmissions, many advances in components. The 625 change over and UHF then colour TV in 1967 with switch over to 625 for all channels in this area in 1969.
Good quality if not HiFi audio and some decent HiFi in the 1970's.
Then we had the economy turn down in the middle 70's along with discount stores to compete with and it just got too difficult for our shop to make it work.
The Toshiba and Hitachi sets etc were very reliable and needed less call outs.

But yes I did enjoy the job but all good things come to an end and times change.
Frank

edit.Quarter wave stubs filters and braid breakers, yes remember them and made a few.