Insignia NS-RTV32 32" DTV (another piece of crap)

[radiotvnut]

It just seems like I've been blowing it here lately. I probably don't need to touch anything old that is worth a darn, LOL!

A friends' Dad had this 2006 32" Insignia with NTSC/ATSC tuner that developed a vertical problem; so, he went out and bought a flat screen. I was told that it had lines at the top of the screen and the image was folded over. I thought, "Oh good, bad cap - I'll have this one fixed in no time". Well, there was a bad cap; the usual 100 uf cap in the vertical circuit that always goes bad. Stupid me, not watching what I was doing, knocked off a small SMT device with my soldering iron while I was changing the 100 uf cap. I have no idea what the part was. Now, the picture is major league stretched at the top and pulled too far down at the bottom. Looks like more bad caps; but, they all either check good or the ones that I changed that were questionable did no good. The only thing I know to do is figure out what SMT part I knocked off.

So, is there a slim chance that someone has any service information on this model? The set was actually built by Orion.

[radiotvnut]

I think I fixed it. I decided to start out with subbing various resistors in place of the missing SMD. If that didn't work, I'd go with caps. I tacked a 1 meg pot across where the SMD went and turned it down until the picture improved. I ended up soldering a 750 ohm resistor across the two thru-hole components that led to the SMD traces. Given all the delicate traces in this set and the number of questionable caps + the resistor that I tacked in, this thing looks like a hack job if there ever was one. This is one of those cases where I'm not interested in "pretty". Now, maybe I can sell it and put the money towards some of my older, better quality, USA made stuff.

[radiotvnut]

I've been playing with this set and I can tell you that the DTV tuner is nothing special. I am close to the local stations and every channel suffers from the usual DTV reception problems. The only good thing about it is that it lumps the analog and digital channels together in the same lineup. Digital channel 30.2 is followed by analog channel 47 (a low power station). I'd still rather have a good DTV converter connected to one of my older TV's.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by radiotvnut

I've been playing with this set and I can tell you that the DTV tuner is nothing special. I am close to the local stations and every channel suffers from the usual DTV reception problems. The only good thing about it is that it lumps the analog and digital channels together in the same lineup. Digital channel 30.2 is followed by analog channel 47 (a low power station). I'd still rather have a good DTV converter connected to one of my older TV's.

If you are close to your area's local TV stations, I would think you would have very good DTV reception, as you probably have more signal than you really need. The only thing I can think of that would cause your DTV reception to be as poor as you say it is with extremely strong signals is that the local OTA signals are overloading the tuner.