Quote:
Originally Posted by mpgasque
Bill, that's just how this set works. The channel numbers appear on the screen and then shrink in size till they are gone. The clock will appear in the lower left cornner when the channels are displayed, but will just disappear, not shrink.
I was told by a service tech that this technology was known as the "Random Access Tunning System" at Magnavox. It truly is random since you key in the channel you want without going through all the ones inbetween. When it came time to market it however, Magnavox decided not to call it the "RATS" system, but turned it around to make it the "STAR" system. Good move. With this system, there is no building a favorite channel list as we do today (adding or deleting channels). As a result, there is no "Up" or "Down" channel button. You must key in each 2 digit channel yourself. The Star System was without a doubt the first of its kind TV.
It was my first color TV I ever bought. I had gotten a good job and wanted to replace the 13" BW with the best there was ($875 at the time). It has moved from the southeast to the west coast, to new england and back south with me. It outlasted two wives and many cars. I won't let it go until I do!
|
I attended Magnavox training when the new Star system was introduced and the Acronym for the system stood for Selective Tuning At Random, the RATS story is accurate I heard it at that seminar from the Factory Service Rep that was putting on the seminar. He said Engineering was fine with Random Access Tuning, but Marketing had a problem with it for some reason
The early sets that had electronic tuning were great when using off air signals but I ran into problems on small MATV and Cable systems if they weren't too careful about getting the frequencies dead on when they changed stations to another channel. With mechanical tuners it was easy enough to crank the fine tuning but these sets relied on AFC to keep them on the channel and some of the systems were too far off frequency for the AFC to pull in. There were some factory mods you could do to increase the range. I had one set that would show a picture if you tuned down but not if you tuned up to a particular channel on a really sloppy MATV system at a local resort.
Magnavox put the star system in quite a few sets, I've got a 19 " set that has the T991 chassis, it's in a very plain presswood cabinet wrapped in vinyl to look like wood that has the Star system.
Somewhere around here I've got the book that I used to carry with the instructions on how to program the 3 lever system, these had a ni-cad battery on the circuit board to hold the memory, they also had a single AA cell in a holder screwed down to the tuner chassis. When both failed the customer had to reprogram when ever the power failed. To program it you have to think of a circle like a pie, then you visualize each slice, now.......One lever selects a slice, the second lever assigns a channel number to that slice, the last lever assigns a frequency to that slice......Simple, Huh.....NO I don't know what kind of pie......