Aftermarket Remote

[bgadow]

There were some, though it may take some work to find them. But the ones I'm thinking of were not wireless. In the 70s Jerrold had one with a box (like a cable box) that sat on the tv and then a tuner to sit by your chair. I had one, it was a varactor tuner, and worked okay but sometimes would have bad connections. Mine had UHF but there was one version that was VHF only. The other one I remember was from the 80s and was a motor that you attached to the tuner knob, it would only work one knob so if you wanted to both tune and work the volume you needed 2 of them. They weren't cheap,IIRC. And with them you had to have this mechanism hanging off the front of the tv.

I guess if you really wanted to you could yank the chassis out of a vcr and use just the tuner,etc, and stick it inside the old tv (which in many cases would have plenty of extra room inside) then you would just need to find a good place to hide the remote receiver.