Motel TVs

[old_tv_nut]

I have been collecting motel/hotel postcards that mention or show TV, especially if there is some indication of a transition in services, like those that boast of COLOR TV.

Before the brown fake-wood 19-inch color set became the norm, you could find a variety of sets showing up in postcards, even a Predicta.

[Sandy G]

...I remember about every color set I saw in a motel when I was a kid was one of those RCA "Mural TVs",,,If you were lucky, the damthing would display color...Did they DESIGN those cussed things to where the convergence STAYED off & at least one of the guns was dead ?

[andy]

...

[Sandy G]

What could you do to a TV to make it lose convergence or blow one of the guns in the CRT? The biggest "marks" I ever saw on one of them motel sets were cigarette burns...Or maybe they made so sorry on purpose where nobody would want to steal 'em...

[matt_s78mn]

Originally Posted by andy

Hotel TVs are one thing that has definitely improved in recent years. Even as a kid in the 80's I can remember that the TVs in hotel rooms almost always had something wrong with them.

Myself also being a kid in the 80's, I remember a particular trip we made to Sioux City, IA. We happened to stay at a Howard Johnson's. Well... The TV in our room was dead, so we complained to front desk and they gave us a different room, and in that room, the TV's sound didn't work right. I think at that point we just gave up and went to the swimming pool. LOL

I also remember that every time I was in a hotel room that had a TV that had a built in radio in it I would always try that out, and was always disappointed with their performance.

Nowadays - forget hotel TVs - I occupy myself with their free wireless internet

[ChrisW6ATV]

Originally Posted by matt_s78mn

Nowadays - forget hotel TVs - I occupy myself with their free wireless internet

Me too... I stay in hotels a couple dozen times a year for work, and I turned on the TV in a room maybe one in the last three years. They look as awful as ever, and these days you cannot get into the menus to at least try to fix the picture as you could in the 80's.

I remember staying in a Motel 6 about 1982 for US$15.95 per night in my friend's sister's college town, and you had to pay 75 cents extra to use the TV. It was a black-and-white 19" set with a key switch mounted in the side.

[compucat]

I was a kid in the Seventies and the motel TVs always seemed to be missing the UHF tuning knob or had it blanked off. I never knew why as the sets were not connected to cable back then and there was UHF reception in the area. They were hooked into the motel's master antenna system. Was there a reason for this? Has anyone else noticed it?

[El Predicta]

I remember the 'sound governors', i.e., volume limiters, RCA used to build in motel sets.

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by compucat

I was a kid in the Seventies and the motel TVs always seemed to be missing the UHF tuning knob or had it blanked off. I never knew why as the sets were not connected to cable back then and there was UHF reception in the area. They were hooked into the motel's master antenna system. Was there a reason for this? Has anyone else noticed it?

Were the UHF stations converted to VHF? This was/is done commonly to avoid high-frequency limitations of cables and amplifiers.

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by compucat

I was a kid in the Seventies and the motel TVs always seemed to be missing the UHF tuning knob or had it blanked off. ... Has anyone else noticed it?

Here's a UHF knob off a TV in a Holiday Inn.
I remember that the UHF tuner still worked if you twisted this knob like any other UHF tuner knob. The maid always straightened it though...

[Chad Hauris]

Usually the motels which used the VHF tuner only would have a private cable system which would convert the UHF channels to VHF plus add in a few premium channels like HBO from a satellite dish. The sets I remember most were RCA's with a single knob varactor tuner and sometimes a built-in radio.

I can remember in Virginia Beach one time in the 1980's when I was a kid staying at a motel I was able to fix the sound on a GE TV with a volume limiter control. The limiter control was inside a concentric knob with another control but I had a screwdriver which would fit.

The Mural TV's probably got left on constantly and the heat buildup from the tubes led to more failures. These were usually high-end models of the consumer RCA chassis with additional features such as lighted channel numbers and a 75 ohm antenna input. The ones I have (a b/w 19" and a CTC-53 and 39) work fine after some repairs.

[Greg B.]

I remember being in some motel with my parents back in the 70s and naturally the TV reception was terrible. There was a master antenna system in this particular motel and I remember looking at the back of the set and seeing several wires attached loosely to screws on the back. I used a dime and fiddled with the screws. At one point, hey presto, the picture cleared up. About 5 minutes later came a knock at the door and the manager was visiting. Apparently one of those leads was some kind of anti-theft alarm and I had set it off. That was the only time I ever encountered that though I suppose it must have been fairly commonplace.

I also remember that some motels back in the 60s and 70s had small signs mounted below their main sign that would advertise the brand of color TV in the room -- some were Zenith, some RCA, I think I even remember an Admiral sign. Funny thing, I never had a decent Zenith set in any motel I can recall. Had lots of crummy RCA Mural TVs too, but more good than bad. But for some reason the Zeniths always disappointed.

[andy]

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[bgadow]

I have a GE 19" ex-motel set from '75, the end of the line for tube-hybrids. The service manual lists several options like sound limiter, a kit to eliminate the fine tuning control & UHF knob, etc. The fine tuning kit included a decal that read "No-Fiddle Tuning". Yeah, I'm sure that really worked!

[Pete Deksnis]

..but the thread had reminded me of this sign just two miles from my apartment. Finally early this afternoon I stopped and took this cell picture. The other side is identical but without that missing piece. The colors are quite bright for something that has to be quite old.