Roundie used to fix an outage today
 

I have a Zenith roundie in storage at the the headend I supervise. Every few months I get it out and plug it in and run it for an hour or two. Today right after I got it out we started to have problems with some of the Viacom chanels (M-TV, VH-1 Nick etc) we did not have any test monitors close by at the time and since I was there with one of my staff members I thought why not use it. He was going for one of the test carts because master control was at the other end of the building and by the time he made it back the old Zenith was fired up.

We used the set to check the channels while we had Viacom on the phone.
The problem was at the uplink end but we get the blame anyway. Someday when I get a real office I hope to have it in there on display. We had a camera so I took a few pictures with it next to the receivers. It is showing Gun Smoke from TV Land just like a roundie should. I took the back off to show my employee that it really was full of glowing tubes.

Steve

That's really neat! I plan on watching Gunsmoke when I get my roundie work'n!

This is slightly off topic of your thread, but it is at least another fact that will surprise some of the people who are vacuum-tube nonbelievers in the "old technology to the rescue" topic...

I was told by a heavily-degreed engineer that in the event of a nuclear disaster, no silicon device will function (i.e Transistors, diodes, or IC chips). So with that as a given, the only means of communication will be all-tube equipment! If you maintain your Zenith, and a REALLY BIG antenna, you might be the only citizen connected with the outside world for news and instructions. If you're not so fortunate, I'll come rescue you with a computerless, ignitionless Toyota Diesel (one of the few vehicles capable of running in a nuclear disaster), and will drive you to the home of an all-tube Ham Radio operator :D

Charles

That is very interesting. I plan on keeping an extra fan to cool the flyback!
All kidding aside; I wouldn't be surprised if we get to test that theory in our lifetime!

Probably still need an EMP proof transmitter tho. :yes: Somewhere there may just be a station still configured like the fifties using a TK-41 without an updated transistorized preamp :thmbsp:

I'm curious. Does your Toyota shut off with a mechanical linkage like the old Nissan 6-33 IH used in a '77 Scout I once had? (sadly totaled in '87 in a head-on with a Toyota truck driven by a soused up kid.)

It's an electric solenoid valve on these. I also have a Nissan Maxima with the SD-33, and it has a very similar fuel system to the Toyota. I've heard that once in awhile, the solenoid will jam and require a swack with a hammer to stop the engine! (Hasn't happened to me yet, but several other members of the Toyota Diesel club have had that). The later Toyotas have a "slam door" that cuts off the air when the engine is shut down. That serves 2 purposes; (1) that brakes the engine quicker so that the truck doesn't rock violently on shutdown, and (2) in case of a cracked ring or other cause of engine oil coming up and fuelling the engine out of control, it will stop it.

Was your Scout like the Mercedes with the lever you could shove down to stop the fuel (totally mechanical)? My Maxima is an '82 and has the electric fuel cut, so yours might have been an earlier different pump.

Charles

I can recall the day my Mom's '80 Mercedes 300SD wouldn't shut off-it happened, of course, on a rainy day when she had taken my sisters and some of their friends to a shopping mall an hour away. Luckily she got someone on the phone who could tell her what to do.

I guess that Zenith has diodes, at least? How many color sets didn't have some sort of diode?

My best 'tubes to the rescue' story came a few years ago-towards the end of our town's annual carnival someone stole the solid state PA we used to call bingo. Out of storage came the 50 year old no-name tube amp-it worked fine, and folks commented that it sounded better than the new amp! Afterwards I decided to recap it and use it in the future instead of buying a replacement-after the recap the power transformer went up in smoke :( Anyway, I have since dredged up a pair of tube amps: a Bogen that I guess dates to about 1948 for Bingo & a Muzak that isn't much newer which I have hooked up to make announcements over the carnival grounds. The speakers I rigged up were some I found in storage, big bullhorns that have to be from the fifties or earlier. Mostly 'Atlas Sound'. I used this setup for the carnival this year; the Bogen blew a fuse one night but other than that everything behaved and sounded great!

Won't all "points and carbureted" gas engines also function?

Darryl

In the early 70's the small town I was living in had a power failure that lasted about 2 days, none of the gas stations in town were able to pump gas except for one. This old DX station had been around since the 20's and still had one of the old tall visible manual hand powered gas pumps hooked up and working. For 2 days that was the town pump.

That would make sense, you likely are right about that. As long as there is no silicon device involved, I would think it would work. But on the other hand, I might have been told that electron flow would be disturbed, so if there are NO electrons able to flow in any way, then only the Diesel engine would run since there couldn't be any spark made nor any electricity required. But you raise a great question, and maybe Colortel, or Gary Miller, or someone else with advanced theory could jump in on this.

But if THAT's the case, then vacuum tube radio would also go dead. Thinking harder; I think the word I was told was that all silicon devices would be destroyed, whereas vacuum tube circuitry would survive. But maybe neither would function during the disaster; it's just that the tube stuff would work again afterwards whereas the silicon stuff never again.

Charles

Still continuing a bit off topic.... I recall in the movie "The Day After," when Kansas City is nuked, the students in the Lawrence, Kan. university science dept. complain that none of the soid state communications radios work because of the EMP. One of the characters goes to the basement and finds an old tube type ham rig and they use that to hear if anyone else has survived. Great cold war film, very scary.

-Steve D.

It sure would be hard to crank up a diesel if no electrons were able to flow unless it was set up to use compressed air for starting.

There are still a few AM stations that have tube type transmitters as back up. Some of them work very well indeed they were only sidelined to save money on the electric bill and tube changes. The only problem is I don't know of any stations that have any tube production equipment left.
So if they could fire up the generator and the 40 + year old transmitter they would not have anything to feed it.

What I have been told it is an EMF pulse when the nuke goes off that fries the solid state junction. Most tube TV's have at least a diode for the detector so I guess that would go for sure so no video.

The scout had a manual-choke-type control you had to pull out to choke off the engine. A pushbutton served as the manual glow plug control. It took sixty or more seconds of holding it in on a cold morning to start up. Then a Huge cloud of white smoke!

In an attempt to keep a bit on-thread: I think the Scout Traveller was among the first or maybe the first SUV. Put the kids in the back on a trip with a 12-volt color TV and VCR.

Military electronics, in order to be accepted, can go through an EMP test. I've hear the reason Russia, when it was the USSR, still used tubes in its military equipment was because of the insusceptibility of tubes to EMP.

I too have often wondered if my old points-and-condenser cars from the '60 would be usable after EMP. I suspect so.

I know this has gotten off topic, but I wasn't sure about the early gas engines. I had also heard it would only affect solid state devices, so I thought these would still function. I hope none of us will ever have the opportunity to try these theories out :worried:


Darryl

I think we're ALL in 100% agreement on that point!!!!!

Charles