RCA Victor portable at GW for $10 in Salisbury,MD

[bgadow]

Got it! Now, this is proof that I still have the "TV Bug" because right after my last post I looked at the clock & realized I could be there and back in time for supper. The set was easy to find; I toted it to the front & got some funny looks from the staff. "They put THAT on the floor?!" and "Look, it even has knobs!" One guy was explaining to a cashier that the set used vacuum tubes & she just laughed, having no idea what he was talking about.

At first I guessed it might be early, maybe 66-67, but in fact its kind of late for what it is,I think. It is a CTC-27 Mural TV. Most of the date codes are April 69 though the crt was made the first week of Dec. 69. The set sure looks outdated for something that was sold in 1970; it has the old logo on front but the new one inside. Pretty clean outside, just dusty inside but I can tell it has a lot of hours on it. There was an old brightener on the tube But I tested the crt & its not that bad so I tossed the brightener aside. It does work-it needed only minor adjustments. Not the best performer I've seen; the focus isn't anything to get excited about & the picture is just a little too washed out. On weaker stations I can crank up the agc and help it but then when I turn to the strongest station it overloads. The other issue is an intermittent horizontal jitter, with the picture pulling in. I swapped a number of tubes & did some other nosing but didn't get rid of it. One idea I had was a flaky cap in the horiz. efficiency coil circuit but that was too much trouble to clip them out right now. Has anyone run into this problem? The aforementioned Motorola that JC gave me has a similiar problem which did not show up at once but now it also does it from time to time. The Moto pulls in more severly but less frequently. I have these 2 sitting side by side and they are very close in size with the RCA being taller but the Moto making marginally better use of the space as it is 21".

I have to wonder what the price difference was between this and the series filament (CTC-53?) 18" models. It seems it would have taken a good salesman to upsell a customer. I have a number of those including one Mural so it begs the comparison.

I have taken some pics but cannot post them until Monday.

Thanks, again, JC!

[Chad Hauris]

The Mural models were more deluxe/heavy duty models for commercial establishments such as hotels, schools etc. In 1969 I don't think the CTC-53 (which does have a Mural TV model) was in production yet...the series filament 18" set of that time would have been a CTC-36, so this may have been the only Mural line 18" model available.

There was a CTC-50 Mural TV which has a CTC-27 or 31 like chassis (18" crt, transformer type power supply, high focus voltage tube) but I haven't come across an actual example of one yet.

[JCFitz]

Glad you got it Bryan.I'm curious to know what causes that Motorala to do that also.It was doing that in the 80s before it got stored away and robbed for tubes.I guessed a cap but never had time to fool with it and needed the tubes for other sets.I was never impressed with the picture on it anyway since the Zenith console 20Y1C38 chassis I had at the time blew the Motorola away.I miss that Zenith.I sold it for $100 to a regular person,not a tv collector so you know where it probably went the first time it gave trouble or they wanted a more modern tv.Sigh.
I had sold that Motorala to someone too and it came back with the jitter problem so I replaced it with another tv.If it hadn't had that problem it probably would have ended up in a landfill like my old Zenith probably is.