My experience with TV sets

First TV bought by my parents was Grigorescu 1965 with chassis made in Japan and electronic tubes. It worked fine until high apartment buildings were built around.
In the '70s there were 2 programs of the Romanian television.
I remember my dad used a long screwdriver in order to get a better image.
The problem was not from the selector, the problem was from the bad signal with multiple reflections. Another annoying phenomenon was the frequency of the line, under 50 Hz and also the voltage lower than 220 VAC.
Very often you must adjust the line frequency by a trimmer in the backside of the TV.
We had also an auto-transformer from USSR to adjust the voltage.

About 1978 we bought a SPORT portable TV. There were models with 2 selectors designed for US and models with push button selectors. The export type had tuner for VHF and UHF channels.
The model for Romania had only VHF tuner.

At the end of the '80s I adapted a VHF - UHF CCIR tuner on this TV.
The only reason why UHF was interesting was Bulgarian TV second channel, especially adjustments on the roof antenna and amplifier. I used it for Serbian TV and Vrsac at the end of the 3rd year of the faculty when we were at Timisoara in some factories for 1 month.
This is the adapted tuner:

I used the same portable TV to align the polar mounts of the 1.2 and 1.8 meter satellite dishes.
I went with this TV as video monitor and I aligned the 1.2 meter dish using the self made receiver type 'Marian Ursulescu'. It was cold outside and this was for good because the frequency of the receiver's oscillator was dependent to the temperature, especially at high frequencies.
I remember the program Galavision, 11.515 GHz on Panam Sat 45 degree W, 36.000 Km above the Amazon estuary, having an elevation of 5 degrees in Bucharest. Outside it worked but inside it worked only when I left the receiver on the floor, not on the TV chest...
This satellite was very good to align the polar mount, being almost at the Western geostationary limit.

A revolution in TV sets was Telecolor, a good TV, bought in 1985, our first color TV.

I did a lot of experiments on it and I repaired other neighbors' TVs.
One neighbor had the higher level color TV, Cromatic.

Channel vs. Tuning voltage (applied on the variable capacitance diodes):

It was a straight line and measuring the voltage I knew the number of the channel. This was useful for sporadic reception of remote TV channels.
The same straight line was for the lower band, channels 1-12.

I used a pair of specialized circuits from Microelectronica MMC1024/MMP1025, pair for infrared remote control, 5 Volt relays and I transformed an old calculator to control the Telecolor 3007.
This "ball" of wires is the circuit, put in parallel with the TV's selector:

Everything was put under the TV, no need of special case or holes in the TV, except for connectors.
It worked fine until I bought a SONY in spring 1994, first TV from my money as employee and just married...
In the mid of the '90th I replaced the Telecolor with SONY and the self made receiver, actuator and positioner for the satellite with PACE series appliances: