One of my favorite lines from WKRP in Cincinnati.
“We can’t announce we’re off the air because we’re off the air.”
The best technical difficulties cards appeared on the little-known kids’ show Jingleheimer Junction.
The leadup to the Gentle Ben one is good, though the card itself isn’t great.
Remember too, the need for the Indian Head test card was to ensure your TV was properly adjusted. In the good old days, TV was a cathode ray tube (CRT) and at first, the magnets that deflected the beam to paint the picture on the screen were driven by simple oscillators. The ideal was that the deflection (left to right, up and down) were generated by analog circuitry, and so while the ideal were linear sawtooth waves, the result was not - some tweaking could be applied to make them as linear as possible. A common adjustment problem was the picture was stretched in the center and squashed top and bottom. Eventually technology improves so the waves were generated by digital circuitry and were more exact. (about 1980?) But especially with tube-based TV, there was plenty of fine-tuning to get a decent picture.
I remember talking to someone who had built a Heathkit colour TV and he mentioned the huge number of adjustments that required.
No kidding! There’s a gaggle of adjustments for the linearity of the scan and sweep so circles display as actually round, and then, since it’s a color set, there’s set of magnetic rings on the CRT itself to adjust the purity so the “red” electron beam lands only on red phosphors, etc., “beam” and “drive” controls for each of the red, green, and blue signals that acted similarly to brightness/contrast for the picture, and finally another dozen or so adjustments for convergence, which dealt with eliminating color fringes.
It could easily take an hour to set all of this up. On a solid state set, it’s more or less “one and done” unless you move the TV and things get jiggled, but with tubes, as the tubes age and get replaced, you either put up with blotchy pictures, or had the set tuned up with some regularity.
I don’t remember that, but I remember the old tube black and white sets. As kids, if we got bored with the program, we could play with the setting knobs and see what we could get the set to do. You had to start with each knob separately so you had an idea what each one did, so you could get the picture back to regular in the end.
Our children will never know the joy of messing about with ancient CRT trimmer pots in an often-futile attempt to get that old B&W TV working again. Keep that screwdriver away from the anode cup unless you want a new hairdo.
Interesting avatar/post combo!
Remember the TV Repair Man? He would come to your house and fix or adjust the TV. I can still picture his big wooden tool box full of cables, fine tools and boxes and boxes of tubes!
Vaguely - I think I saw him twice when I was a kid (I also remember my mother calling the doctor for a house call).
There wasn’t a day that went by when I was a kid walking home from school that at least 1 house had a TV repair vehicle parked in front of it. That was in the 60’s and 70’s.
I don’t remember ever having a TV repairman in the house, but a couple of times when the TV died, we opened it up, removed all of the tubes (very carefully noting where each came from) and took them to Radio Shack. We used the tube tester there to identify the bad tube and bought a replacement (for a few bucks as I remember).
Those tube testers were everywhere when I was a kid, even at the drug store. How weird it seems now to have to have done that.
My dad and uncle owned a True Value hardware store in the '70s, and we had a tube tester kiosk in the store. I remember doing the re-stocking of the various vacuum tubes in the bottom half of it, so it must have been still used fairly regularly.
There was a tube testing machine at a nearby grocery store, and whenever my dad did this, he would always take me with him. The machine looked to me like an old-fashioned carnival scale.
The tech keeps up with the times. We don’t test vacuum tubes any more, but my Home Depot has a similar (though much smaller) kiosk with a sign to the effect of “Put your car key here and I’ll automatically tell you whether we can simply grind you a cheap duplicate or whether you need an expensive one with a chip inside!”
FWIW, test patterns were only used between sign-off and sign-on in the Northeastern U.S., where I grew up. Technical mishaps got the aforementioned “We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by” card, sometimes with cutesy art and sometimes without.