Later Zenith BW Console

[bgadow]

I thought I would share my experience with this set. It's a Zenith 23" bw console, all tube, transformer chassis. I picked it up a couple years back; it came out of my late great aunt's house. (I also picked up a '53 RCA console-the Zenith replaced it, apparently) When I initially powered it up it played very weak, and the second time I tried it there was no raster. Well, I recently sold a couple sets so there was room to bring this one in from the shed. Sets like this don't get much respect but it does have a certain charm. What I found was the all the tubes appeared to be orginal and a large percentage of them were weak. The 3rd IF tube was dead-no surprise that reception was so poor! The good thing about these is that pretty much all the tubes are common as dirt so I had plenty of subs on hand. Once I powered it up again I tuned in the local PBS station, WCPB-28, and was somewhat dismayed at how snowy it was. I then tweaked the dial and realized I was actually watching WETA-26 out of DC-a station few of my sets will tune! I had heard that these 60s Zenith bw sets were the preferred DX set, and this one did not dissapoint. It really pulls them in. That was actually one reason I tackled it right now, so that I could try some DX'ing in this last year before NTSC dies.

The Sams on this set dates from '70 but the date codes were mid/late '68. I noted that the original Zenith crt was, per the EIA code, made by Sylvania. The set is not perfect-there is some horizontal jitter at times. It uses a 6GH8 in the circuit-I swapped it but the replacement may not be much better than what I started with. On very weak stations the vertical can be touchy but it's at the end of its travel. Probably an orange drop or a resistor just a little off spec. Not worth my time to troubleshoot. I was thinking that someday I may add some chassis mods to turn this into the "ultimate" bw tv.