Emerson ECR1350 tuning...

[RetroHacker]

I rescued a cute little Emerson from the roadside a while back - even had the original remote sitting on top of it. It's a 13" set, late 80's. It has electronic tuning, and the front panel boasts 110 channel cable compatible.

Anyway, the original problem was vertical foldover. I changed a couple faulty electrolytics in the deflection circuits and got a nice picture. Buttoned it all up and hooked it up to the cable. I get great picture and sound, but when I try to tune it to anything above 36, it skips the higher channels. Entering manually with the remote doesn't work either - if I type in some other channel, it brings me right back to the channel I was already on.

I've tried all three cable mode selections on the front panel control, fiddled with the memory settings, etc. Still can't get a channel above 36.

I have the Sam's, and it doesn't mention anything. I also did a quick Google search, and it seems that other people have this same problem with this set.

Did cable TV change sometime between then and now that I'm not aware of?

-Ian

[radiotvnut]

That is normal for those TV's. Many "cable ready" TV's up until the late '80's-early '90's would only go up to 36. Some went up into the 40's or maybe 50's. Cable ready TV's that would go up into the 100's weren't standard until the '90's. I have an '85 19" Sony that goes up to, IIRC, 99. OTOH, we had an '82-'83 Magnavox that would only go to 36. That wasn't an issue back then, as many cable systems didn't go above 36. I know ours didn't. Currently, I think 67 is as high as we go. I think where Emerson came up with the "110 channel" thing was adding the number of channels available on the standard off air band + the number of channels available on the cable band, which is misleading. I've seen VCR's that boasted 110 channel tuning; yet, they only had a 14 position tuner. I think they meant that you could tune any one of 110 channels into the available 14 channel slots.

[zenith2134]

Yep I've ran into this issue with 70s/80s sets a lot. One Zenith comes to mind, SZ1927W circa 1983 (9-181 and 9-246) it was cable ready all the way up to 82 iirc BUT the higher channels were very unstable and anything higher than ~40 would even throw the horizontal out of sync. Considering I owned it when analog was almost dead and i had it on cable, I never bothered to find out why.

Interesting tidbit--this is the same type of set with the tuner from the b&w electronic tuned Zeniths,,,,and it had channel 0, 00, and 01! Never knew why....EDIT: no it didnt have any video inputs, like the rca colortraks that used 91,92 as A1,A2