This is one of the free sets I picked up the other day, and the only one with a problem. Model SS1909S, main board (only board!) is 9-592-04. I'm not looking to devote a lot of time to this since I'll just be giving it away. When I first powered it up the tuning was very weak on vhf, and uhf had problems too. I pulled the chassis and soldered the mount lugs for the tuner. (hairline cracks) This improved things; trouble is that the strong local stations are, I guess, overloading. I get a dark picture which will not sync horizontally. The weakest of the locals will, after a second, sync and then the picture is fine. I centered my efforts around the aft button-press it once and the channel display reads what I guess is supposed to be 'S' and press it again and I get 'F'. I figured they stood for slow & fast, maybe for manual fine tuning? Nothing I press while those letters display will do anything. Anyway, is this a common problem with a simple solution? If not then I guess it's not long for the world. Typical Mexican built cheapo Zenith; does have a made in USA crt, and I think this was just before they went to crap.

Soldering the tuner grounds usually fixes these. You might look for bad caps too. I believe F stands for fixed and S for search. It just affects how far off frequency the AFC will tune. For over the air, S should work.

I seem to remember some coils in the IF circuit in some of those late '80's early '90's Zenith's having bad solder connections.

Just picked up an '89 with 9-592 20inch set. Made in USA CRT but boy is it weak. Bright but smearing like an SOB! Oddly, the G2 control was at maximum. That must have took its toll. I dont know why this was done though, since the blacklevel control has plenty of range with G2 at zero, and the pic is plenty bright. :scratch2:

I'd totally forgotten about this one-time flies! The one I found is long, long gone to the great TV shop in the sky...

Haha, yeah your thread came up in a search for the 9-592 chassis. All of these sets should probably be in TV heaven.....:D

Soldering the tuner grounds usually fixes these. You might look for bad caps too. I believe F stands for fixed and S for search. It just affects how far off frequency the AFC will tune. For over the air, S should work.

My Zenith Sentry 2 19" color set has those F and S selections as well, in an on-screen display. However, on my set the words are spelled out on-screen; otherwise the functions are the same as in Bryan's set. This control sets the automatic fine tuning mode; fixed is used for normal TV reception, while search is used when the TV is connected to a video game or other device that outputs a signal on a non-standard frequency. The search mode enables the tuner to find the exact frequency of the output signal from the game's RF modulator.