Hello Y'all


I am now posting my 1993 RCA CTC175A Television set with Buil t in Closed Captioning.

This Set was the ONE OF THE FIRST MODEL SET CAME FROM THE MANUFACTURER IN JUNE 1993.

The only problem is the set has problem with the ON-Board Intergrated Tuner. It has cracked solder in serveral places. the set was repaired in early 2006.

So, Here are the pictures of the set.

I will Post Some More!

Enjoy!!

Missing the tuner top cover. This also have model number and serial number stuck to this cover.

Correct tuner ground repair is with wire bridges around the tuner and a jumper on two islands.

Change capacitors in regulator circuit. This is hairy regulator design. Works off 15.7Khz line frequency. Very low end chassis.

Cheers, Wizard

Thanks Wizard256,

I have appreciate that, The set in this picture at that time was undergoing repairs and cleaning afterwards. I have the tuner cover. I have alot more pictures of the set the next set will be the tuner and the system control which the Closed Captioning Decoder has been intergrated into the Sys Control

I will post the pics soon,

Regards

1993ctc175

Those CTC 175 -177 chassis are remarkable for 2 things - the crappy onboard tuner / board solder points and the tactile switches that fail frequently.
I've accumulated 2 of them, both 177AM2's. Both have had the tuner resoldering done, and 1 has had its switches replaced.
Having said that, for some reason beyond my comprehension, both sets I have produce excellent pictures, and both have thousands of hours of playtime.
Certainly NOT one of Thompson/RCA's better designs.

RCA continued to use the "on board tuner" all the way up into the early production CTC203's. The later production CTC203's, a few late run CTC185's, and all newer RCA's have a seperate tuner module that solders to the chassis.

Those CTC 175 -177 chassis are remarkable for 2 things - the crappy onboard tuner / board solder points and the tactile switches that fail frequently.
I've accumulated 2 of them, both 177AM2's. Both have had the tuner resoldering done, and 1 has had its switches replaced.
Having said that, for some reason beyond my comprehension, both sets I have produce excellent pictures, and both have thousands of hours of playtime.
Certainly NOT one of Thompson/RCA's better designs.
I've got a GE-branded 177 from 1996 and I have to agree with this assessment. After tweaking the service adjustments to tone down the blue tint, this thing has had the most gorgeous, sharp, accurate color television picture I've ever seen.

But I still have to occasionally slap the cabinet to get the picture to return thanks to the lousy soldering, and there's some sort of EEPROM error now where pressing the alternate channel button resets the picture to factory settings instead. I cut the button out of the remote with an X-Acto blade to avoid this annoyance.

Plus the sound is lousy... just look at that dinky speaker!

OKAY, Thank you for the info. I will Start to Post the pics of the set being repaired

Oh, BTW, I have a CTC185 and CTC203 that are both late run The Tuner is NO LONGER INTERGATED ONTO THE CHASSIS!!

Just as I was lecturing about "RCA Television with Built-in Closed Captioning I am now posting the pics of the set being repaired.

here are the four pics

On the Third picture of the tuner I have used an inspection len which was off a 16MM movie Projector which is a very good tool and Ihave found cracked solder joints in 14 spots around the tuner. I have inspect it and cirled it on the printed photograph and it have ceen repaired with a soldering iron.

On the Fourth Picture there is a tuner in a component view with the cover missing. It contains frequency coils and related parts that are Tuner Alignment Factors and, NOTHING WAS TOUCH THERE.

Say what you will, but these TVs are very reliable once the problem with the on-board tuner is resolved. I have an F19261 RCA (chassis CTC185A7) which I bought new ten and a half years ago. The only repair work that has ever been done on this set was to replace a broken RF port on the tuner PC board, and, at the same time, the technician resoldered the grounds around the tuner. The TV has worked flawlessly ever since, and mine gets used quite a bit every day of the year. The picture is excellent as well, like a good photograph or a picture postcard, owing to the video processing circuitry on the EEPROM (maybe a simplified version of RCA's ColorTrak system, without the photocell) and the dark-tint inline CRT; the colors are so rock-stable and dead-on accurate I very rarely need to adjust the on-screen controls. The technician who repaired my set also told me there is a problem somewhere in the EEPROM that could affect the picture, but I have cable and haven't noticed the problem in all these years; if I haven't seen it by now, chances are I never will.

As to the sound quality, yes, it is low-grade due to the small transistor-radio speaker, but that's what you get in today's table model TVs, even the ones with MTS broadcast stereo sound. Whatever you do, however, don't connect an external speaker across or in place of the speaker in the set. This would probably work well if the connections to the speaker and to the TV audio output are solid, but if the speaker leads short to each other or to ground, the result will be serious and permanent damage to the chassis, :yikes: since this is a "hot chassis" design not unlike the old transformerless tube sets. If you want to upgrade this TV's sound, use the audio output jacks on a VCR or DVD player and connect them to an external amplifier or hi-fi system.

I have repaired about a thousand of those tuners over the last 16 years. (I admit I stopped counting at about 650, so that's an estimate). I really like the picture they make, but I can't understand the logic behind the design of that tuner, having repaired a lot of bad ground connections in Zenith and Sony sets, and those stakes in the MTT and MSC/MST tuners from earlier RCA stuff. When I was introduced to the design by the Field Service Manager, I voiced my concerns along with a couple other guys who were equally concerned. We were assured that the engineers had considered the problems in earlier sets, and had taken great pains to make sure the connections would never be a problem. We all know how that worked out.

But I love them, because I earned a lot of money fixing those stupid things. I guess us repair guys should be thankful for careless designs.

I know I earned a lot of money off of them. Mainly from sets that people gave me b/c they didn't want to spend any money on them. Then, I could fix them and sell them.

Within the last year, I had an upright CTC177 RCA 27" console that had a bad electrolytic cap in the 200V line to the video output stage. After replacing the cap, the set had a beautiful picture; but, the tuner would only receive a few of the high cable channels. I didn't feel like digging into the tuner and, fortunately, the set had A/V jacks. I gave it to a friend and he connected his DTV converter to the A/V jacks and it still has a nice picture.

I still have a maggie 25" black table top from the mid 90s as my daily watcher in my bedroom.

I had to fix it twice though. first time, the 100uf, 200v cap went bad causing horiz sync loss. then the 3.3uf cap went bad, caused hum bars and took out the STR. had to replace that cap, the STR, and a little inline picofuse and she is still running to this day. If it wasnt for RCA2000 giving me an identical parts chassis, I probably wouldnt have fixed it. I acquired the parts chassis way before I even got the TV because i needed the vert IC to fix a CTC167. well, come to find out during the time of repair, my daily watcher is the same chassis. gotta love that.

I have analog basic cable, so the tuner still gets regular use, and i dont have to worry about digital.

it has alot of use, and the thing still shows the most color accurate and crisp/clear picture I have ever seen a CRT set produce of the era.

Those NAP Magnavox sets from the mid '90's were good sets. The usual things that went wrong with them were the 100uf cap, the STR and it's associated components, shorted HOT's, and the usual vertical problems. Somewhere around '99-'00, NAP sets really went down the drain as far as quality goes.

yea. well this one hasnt shown any signs of vertical, HOT, or flyback issues yet... if it does, I still have my parts chassis.

seems like the 90's produced a great many uninteresting woodgrain/black/charcoal/silver tabletop sets that seem to have 1 thing in common - many, many of them produce excellent pictures with no, or relatively small, maintenance issues
amazing that these mass produced and marketed sets have held up so well, especially the crt's - after countless hours of use