I believe it was me that was saying you just can't find any good sets in the midwest.... :cool:

So I paid a visit to a retired radio collector today who happened to have this Emerson on his hands, I'm happy to say I got it for a song. Once I pulled the back and the HV cage I found a very clean chassis, and all Emerson tubes in the HV/Horz section (and probably others but it's too cramped to tell). Then I noticed the new plug on the cord, so I figured it had to have been plugged in recently, what the hell...so I did. The pic you see is with a one foot wire as an antenna and a dirty tuner, but white a bright raster :)

Anyone know what year this beauty if?

Cory

The picture....

The inside....clean as a whistle!

And the original back with stickers intact, and take a look at the price tag- $179.95 "New"

That set is brand new! Now tell us, where did you find the Unobtainum that powers your time machine?

Anthony

Man, that is spectacular to say the least! I would probably crap my pants if I saw that thing at a thrift store or anywhere for a reasonable price. I never find roundies here in Virginia. One reason for that I think is that television didnt really catch on in these here hills until around 1952. That is post roundie production as we all well know. There would have been no used sets as the whole thing was a new idea. At least in small town America.....

Wow that is a very cool looking Emerson, congrats on the great find! If I had to guess (and I do) I would say its a 1949 model.

Man that set is great looking!

Noticing the pic on the screen... the first picture shows you taking a picture of the set!

Hi Cory, that is a nice set! So rare to find one in that condition.

Whoa !! What a set !! What a find !! You lucky dog... We didn't have TV here in E. Tn til '54, so it's rare to find anything very old. Congrats !! I'd consider that a sort of "Find of a lifetime".-Sandy G.

Thanks for the kudos guys! This one is going to get some special attention ;)

While I was at his place we stepped outside and he pointed to a small console and said he should've called me earlier about that one. Turns out it's the H-231 in this pic: Westinghouse Sets (http://www.tvhistory.tv/1948-49-WestinghouseTVs.JPG) And it was just sitting there, the weather had gotten to the exterior veneer but inside it was still nice. He had pulled the speaker out of it, otherwise it's complete, even has the mechanical shutter that masks the CRT into a pseudo-rectangle. Guess I'll have to go pick it up!

Did anyone notice the microwave oven masqurading as a TV? Model H-605T 12 Third row down, second from the left.

Yuck, but I kinda like it!

Anthony

Maybe it's one of those early Amana Radar Ranges! :D

Anyone still use one of those fabulous Radaranges? (Made Only by Amana)

Ours is still working like a champ and gets heavy use, it's a Touchmatic with LED display, 16 button panel with cookmatic level. - Not to be confused with the VFD display model with the two knobs or the earlier LED model with the brownish faceplate.

A couple caps did go bad last year causing erratic display and semi-functional buttons, but a little tinkering and some new caps and it was back in business.

It's official, I know too much about these damn Radaranges.

Originally posted by Cory

It's official, I know too much about these damn Radaranges.

Yeah, but look at the money you saved by not needing to buy a new one!

...

Originally posted by Tubejunke
Man, that is spectacular to say the least! I would probably crap my pants if I saw that thing at a thrift store or anywhere for a reasonable price. I never find roundies here in Virginia. One reason for that I think is that television didnt really catch on in these here hills until around 1952. That is post roundie production as we all well know. There would have been no used sets as the whole thing was a new idea. At least in small town America.....

I don't know when TV actually took off here or where I formerly lived. However, your post got me to thinking. I live in a small town 30 miles from Cleveland, near Lake Erie. We have had cable here for years (as long as I've been here and longer than that), but I often wonder how folks got along without it back in the '50s and early '60s. TV reception in this area is fair to poor at best on VHF channels without cable, with one station (NBC channel 3) being nearly unwatchable on an antenna, if the station comes in at all--which it doesn't, as a rule. (Ironically, the four UHF stations serving Cleveland come in very well here using an indoor antenna, with channel 61, the city's Spanish-language Univision station [wouldn't you know it], coming in the best of all! Go figure.) :dunno:

Most everyone here has cable or satellite today. However, I often see the remnants of old TV antennas on roofs of houses here--the owners just seem to have let the antennas fall apart and blow away, replacing them with a cable hookup or satellite system. There is a building down the street from me with what once was a high-power all-channel TV antenna on a 25-foot (more or less) tower with a broadband amplifier and a rotor; I say "once was" because the antenna has lost all of its longer elements to windstorms and snowstorms (we often get strong wind gusts blowing in off the lake, especially in the winter). However, the antenna looks like it is still in use, as I often see it pointing in different directions to get stations from Cleveland, Erie, Pa., Buffalo, etc. so it and the rotor must still be working after a fashion; that or the antenna is so loose on the mast, every time the wind blows it turns the antenna windmill fashion. If this is the case, I would guess the rotor was destroyed or had burned out years ago).

As to whether or not TV was a "new idea" in my small town in the early fifties, I really can't say because I've only lived here four and a half years; however, the small Cleveland suburb I grew up in and lived in 40 years before moving here had the same situation. Black-and-white TV was popular in my hometown then, so I'm told, but color didn't begin to show up until the mid-'60s, and even then I only knew one family on our street with a color set. Most people in my hometown also have cable and have taken down the old antennas, so the street I grew up on as a boy looks pretty good, with no traces of broken-down 50+-year-old VHF-only TV aerials. (Why don't they do the same where I live now? There are still at least two 1950s-vintage VHF conical antennas here yet, and they are falling apart, of course. These broken antennas are eyesores, to put it mildly.)

I see old TVs on curbs here every once in a while, but no roundies--yet, anyhow. The last big set I saw, about two years (?) ago, was a late-'70s 25" RCA color console down the street from me. Would have tried to snag it, but I live in a small apartment and have no room for anything that big (the stand my TV and VCR are on is just a bit smaller than a small console, but fits nicely in a corner of my apartment). Where I used to live, I once had fully half the basement full of old TVs, all trash-day finds, but only one roundie--a 1951 Majestic 16" set my aunt had given me when she moved in the late '60s. I only had the chassis from that one, though, as she broke up the cabinet :eek:!!! and put it out with her trash before she sold her house. Too bad, as that was a nice mahogany cabinet with antique-bronze door pulls on the doors in front of the CRT. The TV chassis, however, worked well on the attic antenna in my house until I moved (the first time) in 1972. Unfortunately, the chassis, along with all but three of the old sets I had accumulated (including a 23" Zenith console I had completely retubed and had working almost like a Swiss watch by the time I moved), went out with the trash a month or so beforehand. :(

Originally posted by Charlie
Yeah, but look at the money you saved by not needing to buy a new one!

Those Radaranges just seem to go on and on for years. I have a great-aunt who had an Amana Radarange for a long time (probably 20+ years, but that's only a guess). Amana really made these microwaves to last, but they weren't the only ones to last this long. My grandmother had a Sears microwave for over 20 years, and it was still working when she passed away in 1985.

I can only hope my own Sharp Carousel microwave, which I purchased new when I moved here in late 1999, lasts half as long. I kinda' think mine is going sort of flaky on me, though, as the door switches are becoming intermittent (although the magnetron and everything else, including the touch pad controls and display, are working just fine :) --the oven works 99.999 percent of the time; the switches act up only once in a while, so I'm not even concerned about it. The only way I'll get rid of this microwave is if or when the magnetron goes bad or the unit blows the internal fuse, etc., but I don't see either happening for quite a while. I like how it works and looks, so I am certainly not going to get rid of it any time soon).

BTW, what is the normal life expectancy of the magnetron in today's microwaves made by well-known companies such as Sharp, Samsung, etc.? (I'm not talking about the cheapies with [spring-wound?] dial timers and with manufacturers' names we never heard of--these often wind up in the trash after only a few years if they are used a lot; usually, I would guess, because the timers give up the ghost long before the magnetron.)

I would think, however, since magnetrons only operate a few minutes (sometimes seconds) at a time, they would last ten years easily. Having just read Andy's post in which he mentions having purchased a used 1977-vintage Amana Radarange (and his still works well today), I would guess these tubes can and generally do last a very long time, if not abused (such as by operating the oven empty or by trying to microwave something wrapped in aluminum foil, without removing the foil first). Have there ever been instances in which magnetrons have been replaced in microwaves out of warranty for any other reason?

Cory, I agree with everyone else as to your Emerson TV. That has to be one of the cleanest late-'40s TVs I have ever seen, and I've been fooling with TV and electronics in general over 30 years.

Congratulations on finding this set. As one other poster (Sandy G., IIRC) said here, it isn't often one finds a 55-year-old TV in as good shape as yours. I do hope you get it working without too much trouble. Since you say you have a raster, you're halfway there.

"Can't find any good sets in the midwest"? I live in Ohio and have found many, many good TVs (many made by companies formerly headquartered in the Midwest, as I am about to explain) on curbs, etc. on trash day when I lived in my hometown, a suburb of Cleveland. (I find Zeniths every now and then in the small town where I live today as well--in fact, I own one, a 1995 Zenith Sentry 2 which still works like a champ on cable.) Many of my neighbors had Zenith TVs when I was growing up in the '60s and '70s (Zenith in those days had its main plant in suburban Chicago), not to mention Magnavox (whose main plant was in Fort Wayne, Indiana, only a couple hundred miles, if that much, from me) and other TV manufacturers based (in the '50s and '60s) in this part of the country. My hometown was kind of a mini-Zenith land, as many of us in town had TVs made by this company (our local TV shop, which is still in the northeast Ohio area but has long since moved away from my hometown, sold and serviced Zenith and RCA TVs and audio for years).

there is one of those in everyday use at the shop.
which is everything from warming sandwiches to executing aol cd's.
the reason the magnetrons last so long is that the heaters are warmed up before b+ is turned on.
3 lytics is all it usually takes to fix these.
Originally posted by Cory
Anyone still use one of those fabulous Radaranges? (Made Only by Amana)

Ours is still working like a champ and gets heavy use, it's a Touchmatic with LED display, 16 button panel with cookmatic level. - Not to be confused with the VFD display model with the two knobs or the earlier LED model with the brownish faceplate.

A couple caps did go bad last year causing erratic display and semi-functional buttons, but a little tinkering and some new caps and it was back in business.

It's official, I know too much about these damn Radaranges.

Originally posted by Jeffhs
I don't know when TV actually took off here or where I formerly lived. However, your post got me to thinking. I live in a small town 30 miles from Cleveland, near Lake Erie. We have had cable here for years (as long as I've been here and longer than that), but I often wonder how folks got along without it back in the '50s and early '60s.

This is a good point. How did people "out in the sticks" watch tV?

My neighbor (she's 93) told me they were one of the first in the neighborhood to have television in the early 50's. They had a 60 ft. antenna that had to pull in stations from Houston and Galveston... 90 miles away. In most cases, you could only watch television during the evening hours. But in those days, it was all people had time for. Being that work hours at the job and "housework" for wives took up most of the day, TV was not something to sit in front of till the evening.

She says, "We weren't glued to the television then like we are now, and many times, watching TV in the evening wasn't really worth it because it wasn't always clear. We weren't able to get cable till many years later. For the money people had to spend to have television, it really wasn't worth it until our local stations came about."

That got me to wondering when our local Beaumont/Port Arthur stations started broadcasting. Here is what I found....

Channel 6 (CBS) 1955
Channel 4 (NBC) 1957
Channel 12 (ABC) 1961

Anyone here that had television before that needed tall antennas, fresh tubes in the tuner, and lots of patience!

...

Back when I lived in a small town in Quebec we had a 10 or 12 element log periodic antenna mounted on a 10 foot mast on the carport roof, with a rotator. Not only got the Montreal stations but the border stations from Vermont and New Hampshire.

Rob

I remember seeing a lot of very tall antenna towers for reception in the Southeast Ohio area (Athens, Marietta, etc.) The nearest commercial stations were in Huntington WVa. and Columbus, Ohio. When I lived there in an apartment during college I refused to pay for cable TV, I really didn't have the money. The only local signal there is WOUB, Public Television. That is ALL you could pick up without an antenna on a big tower. It was real surprising, kind of a shock to the senses to see commercial television when I'd catch a glimpse of it...some of my friends were cable-free too.

Probably a lot of people in the cable-free areas of SE ohio now are using direct-tv satellite dishes for TV reception, especially in new houses, where they don't want to erect the huge towers needed to pull in TV signals from many miles away.

I am 90 minutes from Baltimore & Washington, both of which had numerous stations early on. A decent outdoor antenna will pick up the VHF stations with little trouble so folks bought sets pretty early. It may have helped that the land is very flat here, plus lots of waterways. I have friends who live on a creek in the middle of a marsh and with a good outdoor antenna they have amazing reception. There was not a local station until 1954, and then on UHF. They survived where many UHF stations didn't because where they are located, about 45 more miles from Balt/DC, I doubt reception amounts to much. Odd that I don't see more mid-50s sets with built-in UHF. The local station had a fairly good number of original programming with venues for school age kids, seems mom & pop would want to be able to tune in. One thing that made things difficult until cable really took over is that for much of the area your big, outdoor, amplified antenna is aimed towards the cities and away from Salisbury, where the local stations are. Makes for a pretty lousy picture unless you spring for a rotator and don't mind using it every time you turn the channel.

Regarding microwaves, I must be getting older because we just retired our Magic Chef (was getting more and more intermittent) and I didn't do with it what I always said I would do: fill it with gasoline, the innards out of some flash bulbs, some scraps of metal, etc., and then stand back! (actually, best to do that with one with a dial, so I can be far away when I plug it in!)

(few months ago I had a mostly empty 5 gallon can of used laquer thinner with some sludge in the bottom. Couldn't get it out. Decided to see if I could blast it out. Dangled in it an electric cord with one little strand shorted at the end. Plugged into an extension cord, took it inside the shed, flipped the switch...took several tries but finally got a satisfying "SWOOOSH!!!" Didn't really accomplish much besides momentary smoke & that cool noise. Luckily I do dumb things like that less and less often!)

[QUOTE]Originally posted by bgadow
[B]I am 90 minutes from Baltimore & Washington, both of which had numerous stations early on. A decent outdoor antenna will pick up the VHF stations with little trouble so folks bought sets pretty early. It may have helped that the land is very flat here, plus lots of waterways. I have friends who live on a creek in the middle of a marsh and with a good outdoor antenna they have amazing reception. There was not a local station until 1954, and then on UHF. They survived where many UHF stations didn't because where they are located, about 45 more miles from Balt/DC, I doubt reception amounts to much. Odd that I don't see more mid-50s sets with built-in UHF. The local station had a fairly good number of original programming with venues for school age kids, seems mom & pop would want to be able to tune in. One thing that made things difficult until cable really took over is that for much of the area your big, outdoor, amplified antenna is aimed towards the cities and away from Salisbury, where the local stations are.[\B] [\QUOTE]

Bryan,

I noticed when I looked up the TV stations in your area that Salisbury only has two local commercial network TV stations, a CBS and an ABC affiliate. What did/do folks in your area without cable, or who were/are not in a position to put up huge, amplified antennas, do if they wanted to watch NBC shows? From checking a listing on NBC-TV's web site, I see that there are no NBC affiliates in Maryland besides WBAL in Baltimore and WHAG NBC25 in Hagerstown. Also noting that the latter is some hundreds of miles from you, it would seem to me that you'd be without NBC service in Federalsburg unless you had as big an antenna as you say you need to get stations from Baltimore and Washington. Seems to me you folks had very little local TV to watch (and then not every network) before cable arrived.

Jeff, you're right, you just didn't get NBC without cable or antenna. Still lots of folks out there, some folks I know, who make do with rabbit ears and only get CBS/ABC/PBS. Up until the late 70s WBOC carried some ABC & NBC programming and not that long ago (maybe still) WMDT was listed in TV Guide as also carrying NBC but if they did this at all it was very rarely, maybe special sporting events or some such. I had a long time girlfriend whose family had only rabbit ears and I hated it because I always wanted to watch SNL.

About 1990 I went with my Dad to visit an uncle near Tupelo, Mississippi. He told me that they had just gotten ABC a short time before.