RCA CTC-15 estate sale find!

[Whirled One]

Y'know, all the yard sales and estate sales I've been to the past dozen years or so have yielded exactly zero round-tube color sets... until last weekend. I happened to be in the Twin Cites area for the Radio Daze show and decided to catch a few local estate sales while I was there. [How come I never find anything like this *locally*??]

I guess a CTC-15 might not be that exciting to most folks, but this one has remote control (with a 7-button ultrasonic remote), and it's in great cosmetic shape. Came with its original manual (including the separate one for the Wireless Wizard remote) and schematic too.

Unfortunately, I don't have any place to put it in my apartment for now, so I'll have to swap some stuff around first... :-/

I've poked around a bit inside but haven't powered it up yet. The original owner said that it doesn't work, but he had forgotten just what was wrong with it. I have tested the CRT, and it's weak, but should be usable. It was reading pretty weak to begin with, but started to really perk up when I slowly raised the heater voltage to 7 volts, so perhaps it just needs to be run for a little while to "wake" up the cathode. Hopefully I'll get a chance to soft-start the set this weekend and see what's what.

One thing that occurred to me afterwards was-- could this be the same model as the CTC-15-looking set featured in the Michael Nesmith video of "Tonite" from _Elephant Parts_..? Well, I took a look, and as you can see, it's close but not quite. I forgot that the one in "Tonite" has a wider cabinet. They do seem to have the same speaker grille cloth at least. Also, as you can see, Michael Nesmith's TV has the "Living 3-D" feature not included on most CTC-15's.