Hi folks,

I was hoping someone could identify the tv set that I had growing up in the early 80's. It was a color solid state model, at least a 19" screen, and all I can remember about the control configuration was the hinged door for accessing additional functions on the front of the set. The cabinet was a plastic tabletop model, black with woodgrain trim. I remember it had the Nipper logo on it, and in fact I remember being so fixated on it that I would ask my Mom to tell me the "His Master's Voice" story to me again and again. Channel display may have been a red LED counter. The set must have had a decent footprint, as I remember that when we bought a 27" BPC set, it sat on the same stand but it didn't take up that much more room. I can remember this set from my earliest memories (born in '81) to when it was replaced in the early 90s.

I really remember the remote-a black cradle-shaped thing with four functions-channel up/down, and volume up/down. It must have been ultrasonic because my brother and I could hear it make a high pitched sound when my Dad used it. The remote also carried the Nipper logo. When Dad got mad, which was often, he would hurl this remote across the room, or more often, slam it down on the coffee table as a solemn oath, and it would continue to rock for a couple of minutes after impact. For whatever reason, my brother and I found this behavior hilarious.

With telling you all this, I guess I'll describe the rest of our living room setup:

We had a roof-mounted dish setup (15' or 18' diameter, I can't remember now) so that meant having a receiver, cipher and motor control box, all of which required adjustment when you had a desire to change the channel. Despite having issues with snow on the screen, the picture was excellent, and I felt that when we switched to Directv it wasn't nearly as good. Dad also did a lot of video dubbing, so we had a pair of VCRs as well (and another pair downstairs -4 VCRs in 1984!) all RCA branded. Add on an RCA CED player and a Tenna Rotor control for our OTA tv reception, and you had quite the home entertainment center for the time. With all of that crap to operate, it's little wonder my brother and I moved into technical fields.


I've been meaning to ask this for a while, but wanted to include a picture if I could find one. Well, after searching the photo album, it looks as if they are nonexistent. I hope someone can help me in identifying this, as I would ideally like to find one of these, ideally with that remote. If I was reading this as an observer, I would ID it as an XL-100, but I have seen numerous versions of that set, and none really come close-the cabinet design of the XL100s is usually pretty rounded, while I recall ours being more squared off.

I just did a quick sketch of our tv setup with the fabled set. Hopefully this will be a bit more helpful. I recall the service door had that notch on the right hand side....


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I don't recognize the set. But the remote sure looks like the electronic/ultrasonic models RCA was using in the late 70s and early 80s.

That's definitely an Alliance tenna-rotor. ;)

Did it look like this one?

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c16/ab348/1979colortrak.jpg

I just did a quick sketch of our tv setup with the fabled set. Hopefully this will be a bit more helpful. I recall the service door had that notch on the right hand side....




I think you were confused when you were younger. You were watching the microwave oven, not a TV.

Greg, The Colortrak is from the right period, but I recall the service door having the woodgrain pattern on it, and the Nipper logo was silkscreened in white over that.

David, that Tenna-Rotor would light up when you activated it, and while the antenna turned, a pretty loud CLICK-CLICK sound would sound off from the Rotor control box-it was loud enough to wake us up on the other side of the house if someone was thoughtless enough to adjust it in the middle of the night. We got rid of this unit for a much quieter one that we have now. I'm not sure if the old one broke, or if we got a new antenna...we did burn up the motor on our satellite dish, and I remember that being changed out.

Having done that drawing, LOTS of memories are coming back to me, and I'm thinking now it might have been like a 24'' screen, as the scale of the tv is pretty accurate to the gear beneath it.

THE control door sounds exactly like my ctc-97

The woodgrain control door with white Nipper was on a gazillion consoles in the early 80s; I'm pretty sure that same configuration was used on some table models. If the remote was ultrasonic it must have been one of the earlier ones with Nipper, maybe late 70s?

Well the ctc-97 had Nipper and was ultrasonic with the woodgrain door too...

Greg's photo is a non-remote set, but RCA had a very similar set with the 4-button remote, and it had the same 4 buttons on the face of the TV (as opposed to Greg's 0-9 keypad). That would be a CTC-108, most likely. Made in the early 80s. Those were great sets, too. Only thing ever goes wrong, is bad solder connections in the system control module, which is an easy fix. Symptoms being that it would turn on by itself, or change channels for no reason, or the volume would only give two choices; too quiet to hear or BLASTING.

Charles

Well, fellow member wa2ise had posted a photo of his ctc108 a while back on AK, and it does look REALLY close to what I remember. His image is pretty lo-res, so I wouldn't confirm it based just on this...but seeing that the speaker grille on his set has the fake woodgrain pattern on it really triggered a sense of the familiar in me. Did the 108s use ultrasonic remotes as well?

I found a picture of it! At last! Taken in december of '82, here I am, all of a year and a half old:

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I'm fairly happy that my memory was that good from the drawing, but I don't know what that box is on top of the set. We definitely don't have satellite yet, but I can tell that our 'tenna rotor is hooked up. Hopefully someone here can confirm what RCA model # this is.

I had a CTC97 from around '79 that looked like that.

Well that's two folks betting it is a CTC97. Is there really any place online to find RCA marketing brochures from this period? Anyone own one of these? I see from a quick Google search that an Audiokarma member bought one, but any other info on it is gone, as that was on the old forum.

BTW, my Dad and I agree that looks to be the Gunfight at the OK Corral movie on tv there, or at least it looks a lot like Burt Lancaster as he did in that film.

We definitely don't have satellite yet, but I can tell that our 'tenna rotor is hooked up. Hopefully someone here can confirm what RCA model # this is. That's not a rotator control; it's an ON-tv subscription box... I haven't thought about those since the 80s! You must have lived in Los Angeles, or someplace that had the over-the-air scrambled pay-TV.

The RCA TV Might be a CTC-97 or 108.

Charles

I finally got around to asking my Dad what that subscription box was on top of that set. He said it was a single-channel service called "Spectrum" and that it broadcast out of Philadelphia. They mostly carried Philly sports. Given that one of Philadelphia's arenas was the Spectrum at the time, this makes sense that the box was primarily marketed for sports. Even with the tenna-rotor, which brought in all other affiliates crystal clear, Spectrum apparently came in pretty poorly. Dad said it only lasted a year or two at most, and the company folded. Not soon after that, he graduated to the satellite system that I remember. Does that sound about the same as "On-tv" you were talking about, Charles?

ps-I just checked-I thought the Spectrum arena had closed years ago, but it only closed in October of '09. The place opened in June of '66, so I can only imagine just what horrible shape it is in now.

The service was offered out of DC and Baltimore-I know the Baltimore version was called "Super TV" and was broadcast over WNUV-54. They aired typical independent programming until 7pm and then went scrambled. I think the first hour was previews and then the movies started at 8. It always took a very good antenna setup to pull in the Baltimore UHF stations here, and 54 was tough. My parents had friends who subscribed and one night they had a party, everyone went over to watch some mob movie that was out at the time. The language was pretty rough so us kids had to hide in the back. The party ended up as a bust because the reception was so bad. I guess that was the only time I saw it descrambled. Their TV was a 70s Philco-Ford console, FWIW.

That's interesting-I was thinking Spectrum was offered on it's own channel, but if Super tv was offered during certain hours on indy station 54 (which I remember watching lots of great stuff on) I would guess Spectrum did the same. I wonder which independent Philly station would have offered that?

We had ON-TV in Chicago on channel 44 IIRC. I remember if you fiddled with the fine-tuning you could sometimes get a watchable picture for a little while without having the descrambler box.

WNUV offered Super-TV from the time they went on the air, I guess they were owned by the company. (the station owner was Nu-Vision) In DC it was channel 50; never easy to get a clear signal from them around home. I suppose if the market were big enough they could have broadcast subscription services day and night.

[QUOTE=leadlike;2960859]I found a picture of it! At last! Taken in december of '82, here I am, all of a year and a half old:

'tis a CTC-97, from 1979 - looks very similar to the set on the CTC-97 Service Data I have. LED display, Nipper Logo, and the ColorTrak text above the speaker (seen just above your head/shadow in the '82 picture).

17" models included ED 398WR, and ED 399WR. 19" models included FD 459WR, FD 466WR, FD 468WR and FD 469WR. As it was a remote, it had the R suffix. So there are 6 possible models here.

Hope this helps,

I had a 12" or 13" remote model of that set, it had four buttons, Vol up/down turned it on and off.
It was built in 79 as I recall.
I see these at Thrifts from time to time, next time I'll check the model and chassis #'s

I've been finding a lot of similar RCA's, but all with much smaller screen sizes. Now that I've been looking more closely at these "newer" tvs, I see that almost all of them date after 1984. What happened in '84? Is that when they stopped making ultrasonic remotes for new sets? Were tvs all cable-ready after this year?