What can one do with a watchman

[dtvmcdonald]

Originally Posted by ArmyOfQuad

I went to a flea market this past weekend, and while wandering around browsing through the various things, I saw a Sony watchman FD-10A on a table.
But, of course, there comes the question of, now what? Sure - perhaps I can find a way to rig something up to display something on the screen. But, even so, that's hardly useful, and not even all that exciting. Relying on a device to provide the signal makes this no longer much of a portable device.

Actually I have several and they are useful, IF you have an old TV collection
and a modulator to make NTSC signals. I do. So does the Early Television Foundation.

The use is ... testing the signal from the convertor. I have only a few TVs hooked permanently connect up. Mostly I pull a long cable around to hook up the others. I need to make sure the signal is correct. To do that I simply use one of my Watchmans or other battery sets.

The ETF does have all their working sets permanently hooked up to
a modulator system. Well, all sets that are now or were in the past working. This year they asked people to help fix the non or semi working sets. I went to work one. It started out showing a raster but no picture.
I wiggled the leadin but only got a very very bad picture. At home I would have tried my Watchman and discovered the signal coming in was terrible. But they had no working (with batteries, that is) Watchman.
So I had to go to my car and get the full bunch of sgnal generator
stuff: a DVD player and a modulator, set it up, and load up a test CD.
This confirmed the signal was bad.

After fixing the TV, I noticed other sets looked like they had bad pictures.
With a Watchman I could have tested the lines easily at each one. At this point we ran out of time. Its gonna be a real pain for them to sort out where the problems are in their very complex setup.

I should add that all you need to do is touch the antenna to the coax center conductor while holding the Watchman and the cable shield, and you get a good picture.