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A nostalgic look Colour TV in Aus Last month, we looked at some of the interesting changes that the introduction of colour TV brought to the service industry some 30 years ago. This month, we’re looking at some of those “interesting” locallymade colour TV sets . . . then again, for those in the industry at that time (and since), the word “interesting” is not the first adjective you’d use! B EFORE THE WHITLAM Labor government announced sweeping changes to the tariff systems covering imported manufactured goods and components, there was a general agreement in the industry that colour TV sets would cost somewhere between $1200 and $1500 (ie, approximately 10 times the average gross weekly wage!). Moreover, there would probably be no more than five basic chassis designs: Philips, Sanyo, Panasonic, Thorn and Pye. Of course, the changes to the tariff structure changed this drastically and these prices were drastically revised. In a bid to level the playing field a bit, Telefunken, the owners of the PAL patents, enforced a 6-month moratorium on the direct importation of colour sets with screen sizes of 51cm or less, from the date the first official “limited” broadcasts started in late 1974. 36  Silicon Chip The locally manufactured line-up for 1974 consisted of the Philips K9, the Kriesler 59-01 (basically an electronic clone of the K9 but with different board layouts), the AWA/Thorn 4KA (an antipodean-ised version of the UK “hot chassis” Thorn 4000 series), the Panasonic 2000 chassis, the Sanyo CTP7601, the HMV C210, the PYE CT25 and the Rank Arena (NEC) 2601 and 2201. Notably absent were any locallymade models with remote control, absurd though that may sound now. The problem was that remote control necessitates a varicap tuner and because Australia has a number of “oddball” TV channel frequencies that are not used anywhere else in the world, there was nothing available that could tune in all the Australian channels. There were some up-market fully-imported European models that did offer remote control but sales-wise they were problematic, because you couldn’t guarantee they would work everywhere. The first remote controls used ultrasonic transducers and were big, clumsy and unreliable. It wasn’t until the appearance of infrared models in the 1980s that they started to become standard equipment. Philips/Kriesler The Philips K9 was a fascinating mixture of the antiquated and the futuristic. It featured a choice of 56cm and 66cm 110° delta-gun tubes, with an incredibly comprehensive convergence panel. When this worked, it gave very good results indeed and in fact K9s were widely used in TV studios as inexpensive substitutes for “studio” monitors. Sadly, its very complexity was also its downfall. It was the same siliconchip.com.au at the start of P a r t 2 : B y K e i t h W a l ters stralia old story – the more things you put in, the more things there are to go wrong! Nonetheless, a fully-working 66cm K9 forms part of my “living museum”! The video drive to the picture tube used the “colour difference principle” – ie, a high-voltage luminance signal was fed in parallel to the three cathodes, while separate R-Y, G-Y and B-Y signals were fed to the appropriate control grids. Although this was common practice with earlier all-valve colour TV sets overseas, the K9 was the only mass-market all-solid state design I am aware of that used this technique. Some time before this, Philips had decreed that the way of the future was highly “modular” chassis design, with most of the active circuitry contained in small plug-in units reminiscent of the “motherboard/expansion board” approach of PCs. You weren’t supposed to try to repair them and none of the Philips circuit manuals included schematics of any modules used. The K9 used a large number of these modules and naturally they wanted to charge an arm and a leg for replacements! Fortunately, Kriesler (owned by Philips) used a similar module system with almost identical circuitry and pin layout but their modules were physisiliconchip.com.au cally larger and meant to be serviced. More importantly, Kriesler included the module circuits in their manuals, which were “close enough” to the Philips ones! Like many of the other locallymade designs, the K9 also featured something else new and frightening: a switchmode power supply. Although all TV sets made these days (as well as VCRs and DVD players) use that technique, in 1974 this was something we’d only read about in English TV servicing magazines and then with reference to only one TV chassis – the Thorn 3000 series! When it’s all said and done, the Philips engineers got it mostly right with the K9, since as far as the power supply and deflection systems go, modern colour TV sets are remarkably similar to the classic Philips design, albeit with most of the discrete transistors now packaged into ICs. The Australian version of the K9 was unusual in that, while the power supply itself was “hot”, it had an isolated secondary winding, which meant the rest of the chassis was “cold”. With the modern requirement for direct A/V inputs, this is standard practice now but the original Dutch version of the K9 had a hot chassis. The Kriesler models were basically very similar to the K9, although they’d dispensed with the colour difference drive and just used direct RGB drive to the tube. Kriesler also specialised in the manufacture of “prestige” models with elaborate teak veneer cabinets. Some of these cabinets were so good that a friend of mine used to make extra money “refurbishing” them for a large department store, basically by “retro-fitting” them with the innards of a modern plastic-cabinet TV! And now for something completely different . . . Then I suppose if you want to go from the sublime to the ridiculous, we also had the HMV C210. Unlike the K9, this was a veritable tour de force of dead-end design, in particular the use of a Thyristor-based horizontal deflection system. The story behind this technique is quite fascinating and not terribly well known. First of all, in most countries, the bulk of valve TV sets did not use power transformers, a tradition the manufacturers were keen to maintain with their solid-state designs. The valve heaters were connected in series directly to the mains through a suitable “ballast” resistor and (usually) April 2005  37 Many of the early colour TV sets were real pieces of furniture, built to quite high standards of joinery. This AWA set (sorry, AWA Deep Image Colour set – what ever that meant!) was typical of the genre. the 200V or so main HT line was derived by half-wave rectification on the mains. (You may have read about valve radios being configured the same way in the vintage radio column). With any “conventional” horizontal deflection system, (ie, using either a pentode valve or a bipolar transistor as a 15,625Hz switch), there is an approximate 10:1 correspondence between the HT rail voltage used and the flyback pulse generated across the switching device. For example, a 100V supply rail will produce 1000V flyback pulses, 120V will produce 1200V flyback pulses and so on. It’s no trouble to produce power valves with breakdown voltages of thousands of volts, so they could be run more or less directly off rectified 240V mains. In fact, most valve horizontal stages used a so-called “HT Boost” circuit where the input HT voltage was stepped up to 500V or so by the horizontal damper diode. This had a number of advantages but in particular, manipulation of the grid bias of the output valve allowed the boosted HT rail voltage to be regulated by a feedback loop, which both stabilised the width and filtered out any residual mains ripple. They were in fact an early form of switchmode power supply. Unfortunately, this approach is not possible with transistors. There is a definite technological brick-wall you run into with silicon which makes it impractical to manufacture transistors with breakdown ratings much above 1500V. This means that the maximum sup38  Silicon Chip ply rail voltage is limited to around 150-160V. This was all perfectly splendid with the US 117V AC mains, since that voltage could be directly rectified and filtered to produce around 150V DC, which could then be regulated down to 110-120V, giving a comfortable 1200V flyback. Thus most US and Japanese sets were “hot chassis” designs, often using a simple linear series regulator. With European 220/240V mains voltages, this was not possible. The raw rectified DC would be something over 300V; getting this down to 150V or so with a linear regulator at the typical current of 1A would give a dissipation of around 150W! Some manufacturers experimented with using two 1500V horizontal output transistors in series but this was a tricky and expensive option. The most common approach in Europe was to use a single thyristor as both half-wave mains rectifier and voltage regulator, which worked on much the same principle as a light dimmer. The thyristor simply held off conducting until the positive mains cycle had passed its peak and dropped back to around 170V or so. Although these worked well enough, the various electrical authorities weren’t too thrilled about the way they chopped up the mains waveform, and so the manufacturers, particularly those with a sizeable export market, began to look for alternatives. The Japanese for the most part took a pragmatic approach and simply fitted their European export models with stepdown transformers. This allowed them to retain their tried and proven series regulators and in fact, their European designs weren’t all that different from their NTSC models. Philips, as mentioned earlier, went for the new-fangled switchmode power supply, while others tried a more exotic approach, using a Thyristorbased horizontal deflection developed by RCA in the mid 1960s. The full operation of a Thyristor (SCR) based horizontal deflection system is extremely complex but essentially, the energy is fed into the deflection yoke during the flyback period, something in the manner of a Capacitor Discharge Ignition system. The yoke winding then essentially “coasts” through the visible scan period, using a network of switching diodes and a second SCR to produce an approximation of a sawtooth scanning current. In the 1960s, there was considerable doubt over whether it was even possible to manufacture silicon transistors with a breakdown rating of much over 500V, so for a while it seemed that the only practical way of making an allsolid-state colour TV chassis was to use a big (and heavy) mains stepdown transformer. RCA’s SCR horizontal deflection system was first demonstrated in 1967, as a possible solution to this problem. An unregulated +140V HT line derived directly from the 117V mains was fed to the flyback Thyristor via a saturable reactor, which basically formed the control element of an electronic regulator system. Without going into too many details, flyback pulses of about 120V amplitude were applied to the horizontal deflection yoke, resulting in a peak-to-peak scan voltage of about 24V. This operation is basically the reverse of that of a conventional line output stage. Although the system did work, it never caught on for a number of reasons. First of all, although the basic principle was simple enough, the actual circuitry needed was quite complex, requiring several large ferrite inductors and high-value polyester capacitors. Because of the very low scanning voltage used, the yoke current peaked at over 100A in large-screen sets, which meant extreme care was needed in manufacture to avoid dry solder joints, as the slightest resistance would result in major burn-ups. There were siliconchip.com.au also severe problems with “spooks” (line frequency harmonics) causing interference on the screen. Ironically, it was RCA themselves who finally sealed the fate of the original system, when in the late 1960s their semiconductor division managed to produce power transistors with a 1500V rating, using a design not all that different from what is still standard today. US (and Japanese) solid-state designs thereafter tended to use bipolar transistors with a linear regulated power supply. However in Europe, the SCR line output stage was re-invented in the early 1970s, with a new three-SCR design. This also was designed to run from filtered but unregulated mainsderived DC (this time from 220-240V mains) but in this case, a special flyback circuit stepped this voltage up to somewhere between 450V and 600V. The third SCR regulated this boosted voltage by bleeding a variable proportion of it back into the main unregulated supply during the horizontal scanning period. The revised system worked on much the same principle as the earlier RCA one but because it applied higher voltage flyback pulses, a more conventional (cheaper) yoke design could be used. However, the Australian HMV C210 would have to take the biscuit as an example of taking the worst features of two technologies and combining them! The C210 used the old-fashioned two-SCR design but they also used a switch mode power supply, which meant the main feature of the SCR design – the built-in voltage regulator function – wasn’t actually used! The lack of a boosted HT rail also meant that they had to revert to a special low-impedance scanning yoke, with all the inherent problems of heavy circulating scan currents, dry joints and so on. Worse still, for the switchmode power supply, they chose a peculiar self-oscillating design which, while economical to build, was barely good enough to drive a set with a conventional transistor horizontal output stage. SCR line output stages are notorious for occasionally drawing unpredictable and extremely heavy supply currents during start-up; in fact many sets that used them were equipped with mechanical circuit breakers as an afterthought! The C210 power supply siliconchip.com.au This 1975 26-inch Lowboy Thorn 9064 also boasted “twin hi fidelity speakers” and a quality timber cabinet. As with most sets at the time, it was VHF-only. was one of the least reliable on the market; it just couldn’t cope with that sort of hammering. To be fair, when the C210 chassis worked, it was quite a good set but they were hopelessly unreliable and easily the worst set on the Australian market in this regard. The new “Euro-version” three-SCR line output stage fared somewhat better but manufacturers very quickly dropped the technique, out of simple economics if nothing else! When it was all said and done, it was simply cheaper to use a switchmode power supply and a transistor horizontal output stage and a damned sight more reliable! But then a strange thing happened. Just when we thought the SCR line output stage had been relegated to the industrial bin of history, the Japanese cottoned onto the idea! After a fairly uneventful start with quite conventional designs, in 1975 Sharp started the ball rolling with a truly awful chassis called the C1831X. These were smart-looking little sets with state-ofthe art 18-inch 110° inline-gun tubes, and performed very well. But after a year or so (presumably as the electrolytics started to dry out), they started to fall over like flies. And they were just about unfixable! It was the same sad story as with many other SCR designs: you replace everything, and it still blows up at switch on! Apart from that, they had appalling chassis access, making them almost impossible to service in the home. From memory, I think they were the only colour sets we wouldn’t accept under service contract! But to give them credit, Sharp quickly realised the error of their ways and went over to the tried and proven switchmode power supply/transistor line output system. However, just when we thought it was safe to go back into the workshop, National (now Panasonic) decided to have a go, or show Sharp how it was done, or something! It was the same story – plagued by dry joints, blown up by even slightly tired electrolytics and “spooks” on Channel 0. Well, the flirtation didn’t last loo long there either and the SCR line output stage finally bit the dust! The C210 was such a disaster that HMV soon started selling fully imported British-made sets using the “Decca 33” chassis. This had the distinction of being the only mass-market colour TV sold in Australia with valves in it! After their flirtation with “hi-tech” SCRs, obviously HMV weren’t about to take any more chances! Ironically, they were damn good sets! In a store display, the Decca 33 would always stand out for picture quality and they were considerably more reliable than many of their all-solid-state competitors. This was April 2005  39 The C2201 was the first Rank Arena set available in Australia, along with the C2601. They were very successful and “The Bulletin” magazine reported that Rank Arena had 17% of the colour TV market in 1976. probably at least partly due to the fact that they were fitted with power transformers with a special winding that provided the exact voltage needed for the series heater string, rather than a dodgy dropper resistor. Their presence in the market also provided a handy source of valves for all the “odds and sods” colour TVs brought in to Australia by European migrants! The Thorn 4KA This chassis was almost as unreliable as the C210 but at least there was a reasonable possibility of fixing the 4KA and having it keep working long enough to get it out the door! I think the 4000 chassis would have to be a leading contender for the most over-designed set in television history! Admittedly, the K9 was a pretty complex beast but at least they mostly used common parts and they didn’t break down all that often. In fact, while there are quite a few K9s still working even to this day, I don’t know of anybody who had a working 4KA past 1990! The 4KA was the “Ocker-ised” version of the English Thorn 4000 chassis. The UK version had a live chassis and used a full-wave rectifier (ie, it was “hot” which ever way round the 40  Silicon Chip mains Active and Neutral leads were connected). For Australia, they simply fitted it with an isolation transformer, a move which was adopted by a number of European manufacturers as the easiest way to make their sets meet local safety standards. It’s interesting to ponder just what went through the designers’ heads when they came up with the 4000. Like most of the locally-made sets, it came with a choice of 56cm or 67cm 110° picture tubes but unlike most of the other manufacturers’ offerings, these were a special RCA narrow-neck delta gun tube (which didn’t seem to work any better than the standard wide-neck Philips tubes). The matching deflection yoke was also from RCA and was originally designed for use with a Thyristor line output stage. That plus the fact that the 4000 uniquely had separate horizontal output and EHT generating transistors strongly suggests that it was originally meant to use SCRs in the horizontal deflection section. The 4000 also had an incredibly comprehensive set of convergence controls, all brought out via a monstrous cable to a paperback-book-sized hand-held control box that could be unclipped and brought round to the front of the set. Instead of the usual conglomeration of variable inductors and wire-wound pots, the controls were all thumbwheels similar to those on a pocket radio. They were clearly marked with their functions and were a delight to use when the thing was working properly which sadly, wasn’t all that often! Thorn had developed an unfortunate fixation with thick-film modules, which still live on today in the form of the ubiquitous “Sanken” audio amplifier modules. The notion was fine in theory: a resistor network could be formed onto an insulating ceramic substrate, trimmed with a laser, connecting wires, transistors and other components soldered on, and then the whole assembly dipped in epoxy. The idea was that complete circuit modules could be built this way and the heat-conductive ceramic substrate would ensure that all the components were kept at the same temperature and so avoid thermal drift problems. There were several of these in the 4000 chassis and they were all hopelessly unreliable. Towards the end of the 4KA’s production life, AWA-Thorn started substituting small circuit boards which were far more reliable but suffered horrendous thermal drift problems. The static convergence would often drift 5mm during warmup! The 4KA also had tremendous problems with its chroma decoding circuitry. This must have started fairly early in the piece because the subcarrier oscillator and chroma processing circuitry were all located on a small plug-in board and several different boards were used, none being particularly reliable. I think the original idea was to have an elegant state-of-the-art two-chip colour processing system: a TBA395 for the chroma processing and subcarrier oscillator and an MC1327 for the decoder and output, but Thorn just couldn’t get it to work properly. The 4KA was so unreliable that, in 1975, following HMV’s lead, AWAThorn started importing British-made 56cm and 67cm sets using the older Thorn 3500 chassis. Although this seemed like a huge step backwards for many, at least these sets with their antediluvian 90° delta gun tubes and strange transistor types were reliable and properly set up, they gave an excellent picture. The Australian version of siliconchip.com.au the 3500, (dubbed the 3504) was fitted with an isolation transformer and a standard 13-channel VHF tuner. The above three models were probably the most noteworthy/notorious. Most of the other brands simply behaved themselves and so there’s not much to say about them really. That is, while there were certainly a lot of these sets sold, they were not, as the police might put it, “models of interest” to us! National National’s (Panasonic) first entry was a chassis known locally as the 2000 (also “M4”), which appeared in several screen sizes and models. This chassis was actually the very first locally manufactured colour set I ever saw and I still have a working 56cm sample in my collection! It seemed the Matsushita designers didn’t want to miss out on anything, since this chassis had a mains stepdown transformer, an SCR voltage regulator and a bipolar transistor as an electronic filter, which sadly, were the only unreliable parts of these otherwise excellent sets. Our first reaction was one of abject horror when we saw how the chassis was constructed though, with quite poor service access! Pye For a home-grown effort, the Pye CT25 was quite well-designed and relatively trouble free and unlike many of its “countrymen”, these sets tended to stay the distance. Unusually for a “Euro-centric” design, it used a simple mains stepdown transformer and a Japanese-type series regulator for its 120V HT rail. Pye were also unusual in using an inline gun picture tube from the start; other manufacturers took a couple of years to catch up. Otherwise, there was nothing whatever unusual about its circuitry, which is probably why so many of them lasted so long! Sanyo Another chassis that was “underrepresented in crime statistics”, the Sanyo was another fairly conservative effort, with a simple linear regulator power supply using two transistors in parallel. There are still a few of these in operation today, although at some siliconchip.com.au One of the early Philips colour sets – this was taken from an advert at the time complete with the then-standard “simulated picture” disclaimer . . . did they think that viewers would complain if the yacht sail did not poke out of the top of the television when it was installed in their loungeroom? point they would be in need of a bulk electrolytic transplant! Rank Arena These sets were basically a locally assembled version of an NEC chassis. The story went that a consortium of local manufacturers was offered the choice of the British-designed “true” Rank chassis or a badge-engineered NEC chassis. Legend has it that they took one look at the British effort and took the NEC option! Although the NEC chassis worked reasonably well, construction-wise they were a bit of a mess, the earlier designs being pretty much an NTSC chassis with extra circuitry tacked on for PAL decoding. They were less reliable than most of the fully-imported Japanese sets, but they were cheap and cheerful and most customers were satisfied with their purchases. Their only real vice was that the insulation around their EHT triplers often used to fail without warning, unleashing a noisy fireworks display that traumatised many a snoozing household pet (and its owner!) The Japanese invasion To give the local manufacturers a sporting chance, Telefunken, the owners of the PAL patents, enforced a 6-month moratorium on the importation of sets with screen sizes 51cm and under, until the actual commencement of full-time colour broadcasts in March 1975. As I said, we had good reason to fear an onslaught of cheap Japanese-made sets, in light of our experiences with their monochrome efforts! I was working for AWA-Thorn when the imports began and we were frankly left open-mouthed when the first container of 1000 AWA-branded (and Thorn) 34cm Mitsubishi portables duly arrived – not with horror but rather with amazement. Every single one of them worked! OK, a couple of them had purity errors that needed a touch of the degaussing wand and one or two of them had minor static convergence errors, but compared to what we’d been used to, this was unbelievable! With the 4KAs, as each shipment arrived from Sydney, it had become standard practice to take them all out of their cartons, sit them on top, and let them run without antenna input for about two weeks! Out of every lot of 100, after the first day there’d typically be 10-15 blank screens (some of which responded to switching off and then on again) and an equal number of screens with snow some colour other than white! Each day, the number of duds was a little bit April 2005  41 the life of the cathodes, it seems to have done them a power of good! Bypass operation A view inside a Ferguson set (actually a 7C06) of the period – they sure knew how to fit a lot in in those days! Of course, most of what you see in today’s sets would be replaced by a couple of large ICs and a few other components. smaller, until eventually a week could go by without failures. Of course, then we’d go round plugging in an antenna, and the fun would start again! The story was the same with just about every Japanese import: for sheer reliability and price, the Japanese were simply unbeatable. If I had to make a choice, I’d say that JVC gave the best all-round package of appearance, image quality, reliability and value for money. Apart from a couple of notable exceptions, you really couldn’t go wrong! Actually, “Dad’s TV” is a bit of a family joke that is a case in point. My father turned 70 in July 1975 and so my brother and I decided we’d go halves in buying him one of the new “AWA” 34cm portables. I actually paid the “dealer price” of $333, which in those days was a ludicrously low price for a working colour TV set! He was as pleased as punch and as he was bedridden a lot of the time. He didn’t expect to be with us much longer and so he kept remarking that the little set would “see him out!” However he got over that illness but true to his word, when he finally passed on 28 years later in September 2003, aged 98, the set was still going, with the picture tube as good as the day 42  Silicon Chip we bought it! What’s most remarkable is that it only ever broke down once in all that time (after 22 years). Recently I saw an identical set at a flea market for the princely sum of $5 and I bought it for spare parts. Would you believe that when I got that set home, I found it was also still in working order? After a few minor adjustments, it is also producing as good a picture as it did the day it was made – just like the 56cm version of the same chassis which I found during a council clean-up 10 years ago and fixed for a few dollars! There’s another bit of irony here too. Many of the first wave of imported sets had the “instant picture” facility, where about 4V (“standby”) was applied to the CRT heater while the rest of the set was off. This heater voltage was then increased to the normal 6V when the set was switched on. Grave concerns were raised as to the effect this “convenience” feature might have on the longevity of the picture tube cathodes, particularly if the set was to be taken under service contract. Well now we know! All of the sets I’ve seen with tubes still in perfect condition after 30 years were the ones with this feature! Far from shortening One of the weirder aspects of the Telefunken’s attempts to regulate the market via their control of the PAL patents was the “PAL bypass” fiasco. In 1968, Sony announced the development of their revolutionary Trinitron picture tube. It certainly produced the best pictures available at the time, and Sony caused a lot of concern with their announcement that they would not be licensing the technology to any other manufacturer, presumably hoping to corner the market. However, in retaliation, Telefunken refused to issue Sony with a license to manufacture PAL receivers, effectively locking them out of the lucrative European market. Sony then announced that they had developed a chroma decoder that didn’t actually infringe on the PAL patents, because it essentially turned the PAL signal into NTSC. The upshot of this was there were a few fully-imported sub-51cm sets imported into Australia before March 1975, some by Sony and a few from Mitsubishi. Because they didn’t actually use PAL decoding, they were prone to the “green faces” problem of NTSC, although properly set up, I doubt that too many people would have noticed the difference. However Telefunken insisted that these decoders did in fact infringe on the PAL patents, as they relied on certain characteristics of the PAL signal to determine which lines held PAL encoding and which held NTSC encoding. In the end, Telefunken relented, after experience with the US NTSC market showed that consumers weren’t all that impressed with the Trinitron tube, not if it meant paying substantially more for the technology! Apart from that, neither the Sony sets nor the Trinitron tubes turned out to be particularly reliable, and even after the Trinitron patents lapsed, no other manufacturer seemed interested. It’s rather sad now after all this time to see “Badge Engineered” Sony-branded TV sets with ordinary tubes in them. One of the minor mysteries of all this carry-on cropped up when HMV started selling small Japanese-made “General” colour sets under the HMV and Healing brands. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about these sets except that they used a siliconchip.com.au These two Toshiba sets from 1978 show just how far TV sets progressed in three years. The set at left was a basic VHF/UHF model, while the unit at right featured an ultrasonic remote control! “weirdo” two-crystal PAL chroma decoder system that would almost certainly have successfully sidestepped the Telefunken patents but they also used a perfectly standard PAL delay line system that most emphatically would not! It seems almost as though they changed their minds half way through! The beginning of the end The start of unrestricted importation of cheap colour sets pretty much marked the beginning of the end for the larger TV service companies. When colour was first on the horizon, the local manufacturers began to work out warranty service deals with the service companies and prices were agreed and so on, but this was on the basis of the original estimates of colour set prices before the tariff cuts were announced. With their prices effectively cut in half, the manufacturers naturally wanted to halve the service contract prices as well – but of course, it doesn’t work like that. For all practical purposes, the service cost was the labour cost, which remained stubbornly the same! The result was that most of the manufacturers decided it would be more cost-effective for them to provide their own service departments and that was how I came to be working for AWA-Thorn. Unfortunately, most of them badly overestimated the reliability of their own products, and so their service departments became hopelessly overloaded. The problems were massively complicated by the actions of certain smaller concerns siliconchip.com.au who suddenly started offering cut-rate service contracts to some of the big retailers, who had no way of knowing that these outfits hadn’t spent a cent on staff training or upgrading their equipment. It was pretty much a case of “take the money and run”, leaving the manufacturers (ie, us) to face the angry customers. In the current climate of consumer protection laws for everything, it’s hard to imagine what it was like back then. In those days it was perfectly normal for a customer to spend up to a thousand dollars on a colour TV set, have it fail the very first night, and then have to wait days or weeks for someone to even come and look at it! I had to make many a late-night house call with a 4KA chassis on the back seat of my car! Of course, with the wafer-thin profit margins involved with the new cheap imports, the importers/manufacturers were obviously keen to screw an even lower service contract price out of the service companies, which was generally greeted with statements like “Yeah, right!” This was well before anybody realised how reliable the Japanese sets actually were. If the service companies had known that, they could have cleaned up with low-price contracts on sets that never broke down. So in the end, the importers realised that it was probably going to be cheaper to simply keep a supply of spare sets on hand for replacement purposes or spare parts, which is pretty much the practice today. By the early 1980s, TV set manufacture had pretty well ceased in Australia, although some manufacturers maintained a “screwdriver industry” presence, basically assembling some of their larger models locally from fully imported components. The arrival of VCRs and things like personal computers revived the fortunes of the servicing industry to a certain extent but slowly it regressed to the “Mom and Pop” style of independent operators typical of the 1950s. Much the same thing happened in New Zealand, incidentally, although things happened a little differently there. What used to be one very large service organisation with branches in most of the larger towns, became a sort of “McDonalds franchise” operation, with independently owned branches supplied by a centralised parts buying agency. It’s hard to know where the future lies. In this era of $95 34cm portable TVs, $98 VCRs, $50 DVD players and $495 2.5GHz PCs, obviously it’s going to be a lot cheaper to throw things away than get them fixed. Nonetheless, as “Serviceman’s Log” can attest, people are still sometimes willing to pay an over-the-top price to get something fixed, purely on the basis of: “well, I know how to operate that set!” Organisations like WES Components do a sterling job of keeping small servicing companies in business, combining an enormous parts inventory with fast delivery. It’s truly amazing what you can still get parts for! Having said that, my local electronics repair shop has just closed down for good and that’s something that’s occurring far too often these days! SC April 2005  43