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How can I fix my old tube TV tuning?

Television tube testers - when did they disappear from grocery stores?

  • Television tube testers in grocery stores - when did they start becoming uncommon? I have memories of helping my dad fix our old black and white Zenith TV. We'd bring a bag of suspect vacuum tubes from our tv to a local grocery or merchandise store and test each, one at a time, on a tube tester. The tester was the size of a small jukebox, with many different socket types. I remember you'd plug a tube in the proper socket, hit a button, and read a needle that said something like good-weak-bad. Replacement tubes were avaialble at the bottom compartment of the tester. Looking back, I'm amazed there was this widely available infrastructure that allowed a consumer to diagnose and replace electronics parts from their TVs. When did these testers stop being commonplace in stores? I'm guessing very early 70s and most definitely later than 1968 (that's when we immigrated to the US) but my memory is very fuzzy.

  • Answer:

    The Safeway down the street from my grandmother had one, so, yeah, mid-70's in small town Missouri at least.

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I remember these in Radio Shack when I was really young, maybe 4-6 years old which would have put it in the early half of the 70's.

jessamyn

Ya, I'd say 70s. I was, uh, younger as well. Ok maybe not 4 or 5, but still. I agree, really cool concept when you think about it. Imagine... being encouraged to remove parts from your TV to replace them. Even if TVs still used tubes, liability issues would surely require a bigass sticker over every screw, warning of death if the screw is removed.

The Deej

Yes, I remember these! I was really hot to try it, but the tubes in the record player, as my dad pointed out, were working fine -- when they are not glowing blue like that, then we'll take them out and you can put them in the tube tester. So I'm crawling behind the record player all the time, trying to decide if the tubes are less blue than they were. I must have been three or four (1973 or 1974).

Methylviolet

Tube testers went away as tubes went away. They didn't test television display tubes, they tested the tubes/valves in the rest of the set, as they did with anything else tube-based -- radios, amplifiers, etc. As tubes were replaced with transistors, the demand for tubes dropped, until you could only find them in specialty stores.

mendel

Eckerds in Fort Worth had one as late as 1979.

hodyoaten

There were still TVs with valve tubes in the 1970s?

A189Nut

^ ones that had tubes burning out

Heywood Mogroot

http://www.rwhirled.com/portacolor/, the first solid-state color TV went on sale in 1968, and by 1975 virtually all new units were solid-state. So that would mark the approximate point at which tube testers would have officially started their journey to obsolescence. Thus mid/late-70s seems to be the appropriate time that they would have disappeared from most stores.

Rhomboid

(with the disappearing "they" being tube testers, not tube TV sets.)

Rhomboid

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