Thorn 9001: The oldest set I've found in a while.

[dr.ido]

A Thorn 9001 22" set, made by Mitsubishi probably in the late 70s. It's was amongst a load of furniture from a deceased estate. It's in decent condition. There are a few chips in the plastic here and there, but the internal antennas are intact.



Its working as found with a reasonable picture. It is lacking contrast and the contrast control doesn't seem to make much difference.
As expected the tuner needs cleaning and the channel number bulbs are out.



It doesn't look like it has ever been serviced. Hopefully changing some suspicious looking caps on the video board will improve the contrast. This will be the first set I've worked on in ages that has a conventional transformer power supply and an actual steel chassis rather than a couple of PCBs held in a plastic frame.

[ChrisW6ATV]

Something I did not know about Australian TV: You have a Channel 0?

Mitsubishi sets in that era in the USA had the brand name MGA. They were excellent sets.

[dr.ido]

Yep, channel 0 at 46.25MHz. I don't think it's still in use anywhere today other than as the modulated output from old VCRs and 8 bit home computers. I think what is now channel 10 originally broadcast on channel 0, then SBS was there before they moved to UHF, but that's all before my time so I could be wrong.

Channels 3, 4, and 5 are located from 86.25MHz to 107.75MHz and are no longer in use. Not only did we get color TV late, we also got FM radio late because for a while they wanted to keep those TV channels and put FM broadcasts in the UHF band. Luckily eventually they saw sense.

[kx250rider]

Originally Posted by ChrisW6ATV

Mitsubishi sets in that era in the USA had the brand name MGA. They were excellent sets.

And they were branded a very American-sounding "Melco" before that! Rumor has it that since Mitsubishi built the Japanese Zero bomber, they figured that nobody here would buy a product that was the prodigy of a Pearl Harbor bomber...

Charles

[Carmine]

Originally Posted by kx250rider

And they were branded a very American-sounding "Melco" before that! Rumor has it that since Mitsubishi built the Japanese Zero bomber, they figured that nobody here would buy a product that was the prodigy of a Pearl Harbor bomber...

Charles

Ahhhh, you gotta love the Japanese and their thousand-year grudges. Little did they know that 50 years after the war, just adding an Asian-sounding name to a crapola product would probably increase sales to Americans with 10-second attention spans.