I found this along the side of the road - it's bulk pickup week in some of the neighboring towns - I also found a PortaColor (working!) and an interesting Magnavox color portable, and a bunch of other stuff - more on those later. But this was an interesting find, an RCA portable/table set (it has a handle anyway), I couldn't find a CTC number on it anywhere, but I'm sure some of you know what this is by looking at it.

I cleaned it out (it looks like it was rained on), and everything looked OK, so I fired it up - and the thing works! The convergence is horrible, but the tube looks pretty good, and the sound and tuning work, although the tuner needs a really good cleaning. These are durable little critters!

As you can see, with the service switch set, the lines don't line up, and there is an unusual blue scanline at the bottom - not quite sure where that's coming from. Aside from the convergence, the sync is unstable, it's kinda hard to get a picture that isn't rolling, although the hold controls do seen quite dirty. It'll be awhile before I can get to fixing this one, but I figured I would post and see what model this it.

-Ian

Its a CTC52. Its stamped on the steel chassis, directly above the yoke. Looks like a nice set. 52's are from '72-'74. Those are pretty scarce today like any tube color set. Nice thing about finding the little portables, they fit easily into the collection!

Its a CTC52. Its stamped on the steel chassis, directly above the yoke.

Hehe - wow, I can't believe I didn't see that. I was looking at the lower chassis, and on the back, etc. Wow. I feel silly now.

-Ian

I have seen sets with poor convergence that just needed the 3 static convergence magnets adjusted a little to come in perfectly...also if the purity is off this will mess up the convergence too. An isolation transformer should be used when doing the convergence as the chassis is "hot".
Looks like it has some new tubes too!