RCA CTC 120, weird tuner issue

[MRX37]

Originally Posted by vol.2

Zeno is much better tech than I, but it looks like horizontal sync problems to me. Either caused by the tuner being dirty or something else. I remember seeing that kind of symptom and getting rid of it by grinding the tuning knob back and forth a bunch with deoxit in there.

Uhhh... This is the 80's. WE MUST HAVE BUTTONS!

Yeah this TV has one of those early digital tuners. No tuning knob to clean. And, as surprising as it sounds, I don't think *anyone* was in the set before me.

I don't have service data and this set's not worth me buying a SAMS just for it. I kinda gave up on TV repair years ago. I'm only trying to fix this one because it practically fell into my lap.

Now if I knew what voltages to expect yes I'd check those.

UHF is not as affected, and with a good strong signal on a UHF channel, i can get a good picture. That tells me I can rule out the deflection circuits.

But it's really looking like alignment drift. Because I can see those squiggly lines when the sound bleeds into the video.


EDIT: Did a search here and found a couple posts about bad filter capacitors causing a "twisted" picture. So I pulled the filter cap and tested the sections.

Filter cap tests fine. The 30uf section tests at 41uf which is a bit high, but the ESR tests fine. The 600uf section is right on point.