Philips Colour Television Receivers 1967 to 1983

"All I know about my set is that it was purchased new by a doctor down in Devon.  He used it (and at some point must have paid out for a replacement tube) until it was retired in 1978.  It lived in a shed for many years until being passed to a fellow forum member.  A few years later still, needing the space, he put it up on e-bay (a year or so back) - and amazingly I convinced my partner to let me buy it and a trip down to Devon (where it still was) was arranged!  I can confirm the G6 is an interference fit in the back of a Mondeo!

Much work was done to get it going - many solder joints and wires had parted company - and there was damage to the decoder board where in storage something had pushed against the back cover and pushed a valve clean through the IF board cracking it badly!

The line output transformer EHT overwind had failed  - and due to lack of a suitable replacement a tripler conversion was squeezed into the line cage to provide the 25kV. I now have a new old stock transformer (shhhh....like gold dust!) but have yet to fit it.

Sometime I'll set it up to display a picture...but others on the forum probably have better examples. Ian J has a nice one I know...."

I’m trying to work on a comprehensive list of G8 panels and component changes between versions (i.e. BY01 and BY02 etc).  There seems to be most modification during production on the Chroma IF Tuner panel, due to making it VCR compatible.  All board made were interchangeable, so in theory the latest boards should work in the earliest G8."

The fault looked like poor HF response in the red channel. This seemed to cause a smeary effect of the red with cyan trails following black objects which was most easily seen in monochrome. I know that it was NOT the tube as I tried swapping the leads to the green and the red drives over and then the fault (in mono of course) became smeary green with magenta trails after dark things. I appealed for ideas from the chaps on the Vintage-Radio.net forum and on the strength of this, several components were changed including the BF337 output transistor in the red channel. I was beginning to lose heart when I finally stumbled on the answer. The lesson to be learnt is read your meter correctly. I think maybe I should wear my glasses more often! In addition to what I’d already done and using the manual very kindly lent to me by Michael Maurice and the scan of the diagram from Glyn Dickinson, I swapped over the coupling caps C298 with C318, no change….C297 with C317, no change. Now what, the IC? No! Although I had already checked the resistors in the output stage I thought I had nothing to lose by going over them again and on checking R291 it read 380k. I had mistakenly read this as 38k at first on my DMM. What a dunce! On replacing this, the LF response in the red was back to normal, phew!

Just a complete set up of the grey scale including the DC levels which were miles from 145V was all that was needed in that section.

Earlier on I had gone over some rather dodgy looking joints on the convergence panel as the red green verticals seemed to jump out every now and again but was now annoyed to see that the fault was back again. Just as I started to prod about they corrected themselves again….good grief! After some poking about I found that the fault could be made to come and go by wiggling the wires to the green static convergence coil around the tube neck. I thought that resoldering these would be that fault sorted….not so. It appeared that there was some sort of intermittency in the coil but wedging a thin sliver of wood has cured it hurrah. 

The cabinet was given a really good scrub clean along with the knobs and the speaker grille etc. The top of the cabinet was given an extra good scrubbing and then when dry, a couple of applications of teak oil were used to bring the wood finish up to spec. 

The set is used on rotation for several weeks at a time and performs very well indeed and better than that, my wife likes it as well!"