I have been collecting motel/hotel postcards that mention or show TV, especially if there is some indication of a transition in services, like those that boast of COLOR TV.

Before the brown fake-wood 19-inch color set became the norm, you could find a variety of sets showing up in postcards, even a Predicta.

...I remember about every color set I saw in a motel when I was a kid was one of those RCA "Mural TVs",,,If you were lucky, the damthing would display color...Did they DESIGN those cussed things to where the convergence STAYED off & at least one of the guns was dead ?

...

What could you do to a TV to make it lose convergence or blow one of the guns in the CRT? The biggest "marks" I ever saw on one of them motel sets were cigarette burns...Or maybe they made so sorry on purpose where nobody would want to steal 'em...

Hotel TVs are one thing that has definitely improved in recent years. Even as a kid in the 80's I can remember that the TVs in hotel rooms almost always had something wrong with them.

Myself also being a kid in the 80's, I remember a particular trip we made to Sioux City, IA. We happened to stay at a Howard Johnson's. Well... The TV in our room was dead, so we complained to front desk and they gave us a different room, and in that room, the TV's sound didn't work right. I think at that point we just gave up and went to the swimming pool. LOL

I also remember that every time I was in a hotel room that had a TV that had a built in radio in it I would always try that out, and was always disappointed with their performance.

Nowadays - forget hotel TVs - I occupy myself with their free wireless internet :D

Nowadays - forget hotel TVs - I occupy myself with their free wireless internet :D
Me too... I stay in hotels a couple dozen times a year for work, and I turned on the TV in a room maybe one in the last three years. They look as awful as ever, and these days you cannot get into the menus to at least try to fix the picture as you could in the 80's.

I remember staying in a Motel 6 about 1982 for US$15.95 per night in my friend's sister's college town, and you had to pay 75 cents extra to use the TV. It was a black-and-white 19" set with a key switch mounted in the side.

I was a kid in the Seventies and the motel TVs always seemed to be missing the UHF tuning knob or had it blanked off. I never knew why as the sets were not connected to cable back then and there was UHF reception in the area. They were hooked into the motel's master antenna system. Was there a reason for this? Has anyone else noticed it?

I remember the 'sound governors', i.e., volume limiters, RCA used to build in motel sets.

I was a kid in the Seventies and the motel TVs always seemed to be missing the UHF tuning knob or had it blanked off. I never knew why as the sets were not connected to cable back then and there was UHF reception in the area. They were hooked into the motel's master antenna system. Was there a reason for this? Has anyone else noticed it?

Were the UHF stations converted to VHF? This was/is done commonly to avoid high-frequency limitations of cables and amplifiers.

I was a kid in the Seventies and the motel TVs always seemed to be missing the UHF tuning knob or had it blanked off. ... Has anyone else noticed it?

Here's a UHF knob off a TV in a Holiday Inn.http://www.geocities.com/wa2ise/radios/holidayinnknob.jpg
I remember that the UHF tuner still worked if you twisted this knob like any other UHF tuner knob. The maid always straightened it though... :no:

Usually the motels which used the VHF tuner only would have a private cable system which would convert the UHF channels to VHF plus add in a few premium channels like HBO from a satellite dish. The sets I remember most were RCA's with a single knob varactor tuner and sometimes a built-in radio.

I can remember in Virginia Beach one time in the 1980's when I was a kid staying at a motel I was able to fix the sound on a GE TV with a volume limiter control. The limiter control was inside a concentric knob with another control but I had a screwdriver which would fit.

The Mural TV's probably got left on constantly and the heat buildup from the tubes led to more failures. These were usually high-end models of the consumer RCA chassis with additional features such as lighted channel numbers and a 75 ohm antenna input. The ones I have (a b/w 19" and a CTC-53 and 39) work fine after some repairs.

I remember being in some motel with my parents back in the 70s and naturally the TV reception was terrible. There was a master antenna system in this particular motel and I remember looking at the back of the set and seeing several wires attached loosely to screws on the back. I used a dime and fiddled with the screws. At one point, hey presto, the picture cleared up. About 5 minutes later came a knock at the door and the manager was visiting. Apparently one of those leads was some kind of anti-theft alarm and I had set it off. That was the only time I ever encountered that though I suppose it must have been fairly commonplace.

I also remember that some motels back in the 60s and 70s had small signs mounted below their main sign that would advertise the brand of color TV in the room -- some were Zenith, some RCA, I think I even remember an Admiral sign. Funny thing, I never had a decent Zenith set in any motel I can recall. Had lots of crummy RCA Mural TVs too, but more good than bad. But for some reason the Zeniths always disappointed.

...

I have a GE 19" ex-motel set from '75, the end of the line for tube-hybrids. The service manual lists several options like sound limiter, a kit to eliminate the fine tuning control & UHF knob, etc. The fine tuning kit included a decal that read "No-Fiddle Tuning". Yeah, I'm sure that really worked!

..but the thread had reminded me of this sign just two miles from my apartment. Finally early this afternoon I stopped and took this cell picture. The other side is identical but without that missing piece. The colors are quite bright for something that has to be quite old.

..but the thread had reminded me of this sign just two miles from my apartment.
Dude, you need to steal/buy that sign for me!

Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html

Phil, I'll look into it for you.

This is a thread I put up last year... It's a great sign at a motel in Mojave, CA

http://audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=68666&highlight=motel+sign

As far as motel TVs; I've had a few. The earliest was a Hoffman 12" round tube set with no audio and no on-off switch in it. It was evidently designed to go up high, and then there was a radio with a coin box that sat on the bureau, which also provided the sound and the coin-op control for the TV. I have also bad memories of a Packard-Bell 21" B&W table model at the Motel 6 in Lompoc, CA... it was about 1974, and my mother and I stayed a night there on the way to someplace we were going. The TV had horrible reception, and it cost .75 to find that out. I was really upset that I missed my Saturday morning cartoons that day! The first color TV in a motel I saw was a Magnavox tube set at Howard Johnson's in Chester, PA in 1978. It actually worked OK.

Charles

There is one of those RCA signs in the next town over. Or, maybe was. Seems as though when I rode by there Saturday the whole big sign was gone. Could be wrong. Will have to check it out. These seem fairly common, must be early seventies? I haven't seen one with the old RCA logo. I saw a Tv by the dumpster at one very old motel last year. I guess that place just used whatever they could buy cheap as it looked to be a Chromacolor II console!

The one "decent" motel here had a big ad on their sign-"COLOR TV !!" & each one of the letters was in a different color. After asking around, I'm reasonably sure they had roundies at one time-But that was a looooooong time ago, & the motel shut down about 20-25 yrs ago, basically due to a lack of business. I rarely, if ever went out there when I was a kid-there were supposedly a couple of "Ladies of the Evening" who plied their trade outta that motel, & I would have gotten a pretty good beating if I'd been caught out there...

OLD-TV-NUT I love those postcards. Looks like 50's-60's? I was born in 1968 but if I could go back in time for a week it would be mid 50's. I don't know why but it just looks so inviting, warm.

Here's one I found that appears to have a pay meter attached.

Look at the carpet and the wall treatments!! Oh please Mr Einstein, invent a time machine!!

those are neat photos. I always like those 50's-60's motels. Before the yuppies moved into Downers Grove and destroyed its character, there were many 50's era motels on Ogden ave. All of which had that "COLOR TV BY RCA" sign which was hanging below the motel sign. All the motels had those great neon signs and most even had "TV" in the neon.
Unfortunately, I wasnt around when those mural TV's were in use. I doubt any motels were using tube type color sets in their rooms back in '83.


Id like to find these old motel color sets, but I think they are long gone. I was fortunate enough to find a motel set last year. However, I wasnt aware that it was a motel set when I found it. It was a tube type Ford Philco hybrid set. It had a peice of woodgrained contact paper that covered the entire top of the set which matched the rest of the cabinet (plastic photofinish). I figured it was to hide some bad scraches. Captianmoody was interested in it and I gave it to him. When he pulled the contact paper off, it revealed "DAYS INN" which was branded onto the cabinet top. Most likely from a local Days Inn in berwyn where the set came from. that one was from around 1972 I think.

This thread reminds me of a movie with what appears to be a CTC-38 or 39 in a motel room. Heres a few screen shots from the 1974 film "The Conversation". Gene Hackman is in the motel room with the CTC-38/9. Notice that it has the mural TV vhf tuning knob. The movie was supposedly filmed in december of '72. So that set was probably 1 or 2 years old at the time.

There were a bunch of "rent by the hour" motels around here in the early to mid '90's all owned by the same person. Most of their sets were late '70's RCA 19" XL-100's with rotary tuning and a built in AM/FM radio. They did have a few older tube RCA's left and a few early '80's RCA's with the single knob varactor tuner. The reason I know that is because the owners thought I would repair them for $5 or $10 a set just because I was a kid. Around the same time, a retired TV man gave me a bunch of 18" Philco hybrid color TV's (and remains). None were worth repairing so I wound up junking them. These belonged to Travel Inn and the man that gave them to me said they were replaced by Zenith's in the early '80's. In '97, I bought 20 19" GE rotary tuner PC chassis motel sets for $5 each from Motel 6. These were from the early to mid '80's and most of them still somewhat worked. Yeah, I got in a little hot water with my parents when all of those got brought home! I doubt there are currently any rotary tuner (let alone tube type) motel sets in use unless they are used in very low end motels.