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February 1969 Electronics World
Table of Contents
Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles
from
Electronics World, published May 1959
- December 1971. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.
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December
30 was the date whereon in the year 1953, the first commercially available color television
set - the Admiral C1617A - went on sale. Mac McGregor and his repair shop technician,
Barney, had been servicing color TVs since at least February 1955 as printed in
a Radio & Television News magazine story titled, "Barney Takes on Color." This particular edition laments the increasing
cost of servicing color television sets as they get increasingly complex. Mac and
Barney agree that one of the reasons for service cost is having to work with the
newfangled printed circuit boards. Those early PCBs, even though most were only
single sided or double sided, the metal traces and component solder pads easily
separated from the substrate, especially when people were trying to use the old
kilowatt soldering irons to work with point-to-point wiring which terminated on
solder posts or lugs. Switching to a 25-watt iron with a small tip greatly reduced
the incidence of lifted pads. Like all other technological advances, it just required
the passage of time with a commensurate amount of trial and error to get things
right. The TV industry tried integrating plug-in modules that would be swapped out
to get the set functional quickly, but that trend had just begun when this article
was written so there wasn't any empirical data to measure the success or failure
of it. As I have mentioned many times, these stories were actually reports on the
state of particular parts of the electronics industry.
Mac's Service Shop: Cost of Color TV Service
 By providing built-in serviceability, set
makers can reduce the soaring cost of color-TV repairs.
It was a pleasant February day, both inside and outside Mac's Service Shop. Outside
the brilliant sun had nudged the mercury up to nearly 50 degrees - the warmest it
had been since last November. Inside Mac and his assistant, Barney, were enjoying
the rare experience of having every single set in the shop repaired, ticketed, and
ready to go. They chatted back and forth contentedly as they cleaned up the bench,
wiped off the instruments, and racked up the tools.
"Mac," Barney said, "a little while back I read an interview with Joseph C. Duncan,
national customer service manager for the J. C. Penney Co., in which he said that
according to an industry estimate the owners of color-TV sets spent some $400 million
on repairs in 1968 and that this annual color-TV service bill would zoom to $4 billion
within the next ten years."
"Sounds good for the color-TV service business."
"That is not exactly what he had in mind. He feels that within five years these
skyrocketing repair bills will begin to clog sales, and if that is allowed to happen,
everyone in the color-TV business will be adversely affected."
"Does he consider color-TV service charges excessive?" "He didn't seem to be
criticizing the service technician as much as he did the color-TV manufacturer.
He said poor chassis layout and allowing manufacturing cost considerations to arbitrarily
dictate component location and fabrication techniques were major factors in the
high cost of color-TV service. Test points are often buried so deep inside the chassis
that they require considerable labor to reach. Other components, such as transistors,
are soldered into the circuit so they are difficult to remove for testing or replacement
without damage; and when a new unit is called for, it is likely to be damaged in
soldering it to the circuit board."
 "He'll not get an argument out of me that way,"
Mac stated. "You know what a rare and pleasant surprise it is for us to find transistor
sockets in any present-day electronic equipment. When this does happen, we feel
a warm wave of gratitude to the engineer who designed the equipment. Be obviously
expected his brain-child to last long enough to need service eventually and to be
worth repairing - two considerations that obviously played no part in the design
of much of the stuff that crosses our bench today. Does .Mr. Duncan have any suggestions
as to how color-TV repair costs can be lowered?"
"Quite a few. He wants all TV sets designed so test points are clearly called
out and easily accessible. He estimates this would add only about 50¢ to the
cost of manufacturing a set. He also thinks transistor sockets should be used. This,
he admits, would add a few more dollars to the cost of the set.
"But he doesn't stop there. He believes a special, easily accessible panel should
be developed that would connect to all important test points and permit a malfunctioning
circuit to be quickly located by current and voltage measurements or waveform analysis
made right at this test panel."
"I should imagine he would react favorably to Motorola's new Quasar chassis.
You know that's the one using only one vacuum tube (the picture tube) along with
68 transistors and other solid-state components. It employs ten plug-in component
boards, each of which is removable and can be replaced as a whole by the service
technician."
"You're right; but he thinks this module concept should be carried still further
to include an indicator for each module to show if it is functioning properly. How
does that strike you?"
"Not quite so favorably. Making color-TV sets easier, quicker, and less costly
to service is one thing; trying to build them so the customer can do his own servicing
is something else. Encouraging the customer to believe he can successfully and safely
service something as complicated as a color-TV receiver is about as practical as
publishing a book on 'Brain Surgery Self-Taught.' You and I both know that designing
an indicator to signal a significant deviation from a normal waveform would be both
complicated and costly. Equipping each module with a reliable trouble indicator-and
a trouble indicator is worse than useless if it's not reliable - would add a prohibitive
amount to the cost of the receiver."
"I agree. You can justify just so much extra cost to make a receiver easier to
service; from there on you're defeating your purpose. Dr. Duncan apparently knows
that, but he argues that not all the increased set cost would have to be passed
on to the consumer because warranty service costs to the dealer would be less expensive."
"That's true, and I hope color-TV manufacturers were listening to Mr. Duncan's
comments. Zenith, as you know, has talked about the serviceability of their hand-wired
chassis for a long time. Now Motorola has joined them and talks freely about trying
to make their color-TV receivers easier to service: I'm glad to see these two companies
have the courage to try to sell 'serviceability,' and I hope other manufacturers
join them. Admittedly, it takes courage to talk about the possibility that the product
you are trying to sell requires repair. That is not a pleasant thought for the customer
to have in mind when he is shopping for a color set. The salesman would prefer that
the customer thought only of how much he was going to enjoy his receiver watching
the Rose Parade or 'Laugh-In's' bikini girls in living color.
"Automobile manufacturers went through much the same thing. For a long time they
argued that people wouldn't buy safety, when actually they were reluctant to suggest,
even indirectly, that their customer might be involved in a crippling or fatal accident
in the chromed beauty they were trying to sell him. It was 'bad sales psychology'
to bring up such a distasteful possibility. But once public opinion and the government
forced all car manufacturers to include basic safety features, they discovered that
talking about safety didn't frighten away customers at all; and now they actually
compete with one another in telling about how much they have done to make their
products safe.
"And right now it looks as though they, too, may be forced to give more thought
to the serviceability of automobiles. Designs that make necessary excessive costs
for replacing easily-damaged parts are under investigations, along with new-car
warranties, and out of these investigations may well come further government regulations.
TV set manufacturers might do well to take heed.
"Strictly speaking, now is an excellent time for the color-TV set manufacturers
to do some soul-searching and head-scratching on this matter of making their products
easier and less-costly to service. We are just on the verge of a whole new line
of solid-state color-TV receivers; so what better time could there be for designing
more serviceability into this new breed of receivers?"
"Yeah man!" Barney agreed, "and I think a darned good place to start would be
to include sockets for the transistors and the IC's that will go into those receivers.
Not long ago I was reading where Gerald F. Hunt, vice-president for new products
of the Cinch Manufacturing Co., estimated that 10% of all IC's are now socketed
and that there is a significant trend toward the use of still more sockets in areas
where the IC's will need replacement. Beyond a doubt, that will include color-TV
receivers. Here's hoping the manufacturers don't solder those 14-contacts-plus directly
to the circuit board!"
"Amen!" Mac seconded. "Actually I wonder if maybe the military may not be pointing
the way toward color-TV servicing in the future with the automatic testing equipment
they use to keep vital communications and avionics gear in top operating condition.
I'm thinking of the Navy's Versatile Avionics Shop Test (Vast) system; the Air Force's
General Purpose Automatic Test Sets (GPATS); and the Army's Depot Installed Maintenance
Automatic Test Equipment (DIMATE) and Land Combat Support System (LCSS)."
"How do they work?"
"Well, the DIMATE system is typical. A magnetic tape directs DIMATE's pre-programmed
computer which operates signal-generating and signal-detecting instruments to compare
actual and ideal test results to determine if the unit under test is working properly.
If not, DIMATE prints out a description of the malfunction. Recently equipment of
this kind was used at the Sacramento Depot to check out some 1000 Vietnam-bound
walkie-talkies in an average time of 8 1/2 minutes per set. It takes a skilled technician
1 1/2 hours to check out one of the transceivers."
"Hey, you're surely not suggesting every service shop should have one of these
little DIMATE gems that probably take up a couple of Army trucks and cost several
hundred thousand dollars!"
"You're low. The cost is between two and three million dollars. Of course I'm
not suggesting anything so elaborate as that. What I do have in mind, though, is
that the basic principle might well be applied to color-TV servicing. If the manufacturers
will get together now and decide upon some standardization in the location and marking
of circuit test points - both for signal injection and signal pick-off - and if
these test points are either brought out to a standard test panel or are made readily
accessible so that such a panel can be quickly connected to all of them, then it
would not be too difficult to design a compact signal-generating and signal-detecting
battery of instruments that would plug into that panel and at the dictation of a
simple, versatile programmer, say a punched tape, would test all the circuits of
the TV receiver in proper sequence and reveal to the eye of the the technician exactly
what circuit was malfunctioning. "
"I know it could be done," Barney said enthusiastically. "For people who have
worked out all the tough problems that had to be overcome to produce color-TV as
we have it today, designing such an automatic test set should be duck soup."
"I feel we should say one thing before leaving the subject," Mac concluded. "Up
until now color-TV manufacturers have been chiefly concerned with trying to get
the cost of their sets down until almost everyone could afford a color receiver.
If, in their determination to do this, they have ignored the problem of serviceability,
this can be understood. But now the fear of high service costs is beginning to be
as much a detriment to sales as is the initial cost. This is a good thing to ponder
- but not for too long!"
Color and Monochrome (B&W) Television
Articles
Mac's Radio Service Shop Episodes on RF Cafe
This series of instructive
technodrama™
stories was the brainchild of none other than John T. Frye, creator of the
Carl and Jerry series that ran in
Popular Electronics for many years. "Mac's Radio Service Shop" began life
in April 1948 in Radio News
magazine (which later became Radio & Television News, then
Electronics
World), and changed its name to simply "Mac's Service Shop" until the final
episode was published in a 1977
Popular Electronics magazine. "Mac" is electronics repair shop owner Mac
McGregor, and Barney Jameson his his eager, if not somewhat naive, technician assistant.
"Lessons" are taught in story format with dialogs between Mac and Barney.
Color and Monochrome (B&W) Television
Articles
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