What is The Latest addition to your Collection?

@Emiel - thank you for the reminder, the link you provided shows that The Fathers of this site had been active in the olden days and posted some Totally Awesome photos from the land of "Walk-mania"...
I should talk to my neighbor @Boodokhan to maybe re-post some of the gems I suspect my friend has in his collection... Can only hope that @CDV wouldn't jump his gun, on behalf of 'under-privileged proletariats' who die in masses and live like pigs while folks like me worry about Oxygen-Free-Long-Grain-Copper interconnects

 

well, if it counts for portable tv‘s as well: i was lucky to find a Panasonic CT-101 - the smallest crt colour tv ever made, to add to my collection (…reminder: i am a fully trained tv- and radio- technician, a job, wich doesn‘t exist anymore !):

 

yay, let us know wich model - and let‘s start a portable tv- fred

 

Very nice portable! Was it designed for a specific purpose? On the go it would be really hard to use / watch for a longer period due to the small screen size.

 

http://stereo2go.com/forums/threads/finally-tv-on-the-radio.3389/
Is pretty close. Maybe @Mister X could expand the title.
I have the Panasonic 2.2" set I should take some pictures of.

p.s. I didn't know @autoreverser was a TV repairman. I have mentioned before that I know someone who is now retired who lives in a £500000+ house, paid for by repairing TVs in his garage. Coincidentally someone was asking on a local forum yesterday where they could get an LCD TV with what sounded like a backlight fault fixing. Most replies were "Flat screen TVs aren't fixable. Treat yourself to a new one"

p.p.s. I just saw @Emiel 's question. The 2.2" Panasonic I have still has a label from a Video production company on it. A colleague whose hobby was home video used to take a small colour CRT TV with him on holiday as back then he said you couldn't judge colour from any LCD display.

 

well, with many modern flat-screen tv it‘s a real problem to fix them, in fact many of them you can‘t even open anymore without damaging the housing ( like Jura coffee-machines).

i‘ve learned my profession in the early 80‘es, a time when this job was a well respected job, when tv‘s and radios were fixable in general and not made to be thrown away after a defect. this whole crap actually started (in germany) slowly in the mid 80‘es, means while i was still busy training. fixable tv‘s came out of fashion when the prices dumped.
don‘t forget, that in those days a good tv-set costed half as much as a new (small) car - as today, you can buy a good tv for 300 bucks, that thingy features more than any tv of the 80‘es…

how do you want to charge somebody f.ex. a repair-price of 200 bucks, when a new set with warranty etc. costs only 300 ?
sadly that‘s impossible, that‘s why a tv repairman in a £ 500.000,- house must have some other source for his welfare somewhere, i guess

i‘m not fixing tv‘s and radios for a living, i‘m fixing electric cars, that has more future…

anyway, for the mods: i guess a portable tv-section would be nice, with two sub-folder, crt and lcd (?)
i have a few crt’s to introduce

 

…aah, ad just b.t.w.: it‘s a pain in the ass to watch on that thingy longer than 3 minutes

 

From his age I would guess that the person I know started in the early 1970s, when the house cost about £15000 and a colour TV £300 upwards.
I first met him in 1989 when I changed jobs and moved house. One of the reasons for doing that was so I could afford a decent TV. As soon as I moved into my new (£65000) house I spent £440 on a 25" Toshiba. That wasn't even a top of the range model. The 25" Toshiba Nicam set was an extra £100 and the big Sonys even more.
I actually used to recommend my repairman friend to quite a few people. He charged about £80 a repair. I can still recall how pleased a colleague was when he fixed her Aiwa Midi system with a blown amp. The shop where she bought it had suggested she should just spend £250 on a new one. As you say it is the plummeting prices that have made professional repairs uneconomic.

 

You are right and a profession that no longer exists ... what happened to you happened here too ... all the TV repair shops have disappeared .... with digital I just hope they do not also remove the Radio Fm frequencies in favor del Dab ... it would mean death for all Normal radios ... even if the road is that

 

I hope indeed that some stations will be kept on FM.
A viable option to keep some basic functionality is a small FM Bluetooth transmitter, ones you can buy for your car for instance.
Useful to transmit audio over Bluetooth to your FM built-in radio.
On the planned obsolescence for mobile phones sadly, it seems to be going into the direction of the scrap heap.
I still have a few working Nokia's that are going to be rendered useless when the 2G bands will go offline.
The smaller ones had my interest back then (6510, 8210, 8310, 8910(i), ..), and I still keep a couple of prepaid SIMs alive every 6 month to occasionally use them. For fun obviously.

 

@Silver965 I do have a feeling that FM radio will become a thing of the past at some point. The good thing about 88-108Mhz is the frequencies are to low to be able to carry a significant amount of bandwidth in the digital domain.
But from another perspective, listening to FM radio clearly isn't as popular as before. On newer cars, listenting to streaming services is the most convenient way to consume music. As is with phones, computers, which most do not even have FM receivers.

@Emiel Planned obsolescence is something that will come into contradiction with very tight environmetal standards of the future. EU is going to pass "Right to repair" legislation in 2022, which is a step forward in the right direction.
How much it will actually improve things remains to be seen. This will also increase the demand for repairs, which has already been increasing in the last couple of years.
GSM bands will take some time to go offline, in Romania most rural areas only have GSM coverage (some very isolated one don't even have that) and even in big cities, voice calls are sometimes routed through GSM. 4G doesn't work for voice calls here.

 

Laws in regard to radio require transmitters to be tested to comply with regulatory standards and have a certification which proves that. The tests must be conducted by an authorized company in an anechoic chamber. Expensive unless the transmitter is mass produced.
This is critical because immediately next to the 108Mhz starts the airband (109Mhz-137Mhz). It is very likely that cheap ones sold on Amazon/ebay/AliExpress do not have those certifications and proper filtering, so may have spectrum leakeage in the adjacent bands.
The standards themselves and the particular requirements do vary with country, but absolutely all countries in the world require those certifications.
More details here: https://www.sunfiretesting.com/What-is-FCC-Certification/

For small power (don't know the exact value), FM transmitters can be used without a license (as those FM modulators for cars), but when higher transmit power is used, a license is also required to transmit on that frequency band.
ISM bands are much more friendly when it comes to DIY, as there are pre-certified modules available on the market for those bands. Those ISM bands don't require a license, but are usually limited to low power (like 100mW).
The devices must be tested for EMC compliance as well to be suited for use or sold on the market. If operated on mains voltage, some addtional certifications in regard to safety may also be required.

 

i‘ve gone through the effort to organize me a (vintage) professional test-transmitter (from Rhode&Schwarz), featuring a modulated input and working on AM and some SW bands. i have on my mind to switch that thing on every now and then, broadcasting some selfe made shellac-session, to give the opportunity to all those pre-FM tube radio lovers to use their radios.
yes, off course you do need an official frequency then, but i guess nobody will sue me for running a pirate-radio station in a bandwith, wich doesn‘t get used by anyone else.
i built my own little tv-transmitter (in UhF-range) to be able to run my little portables, at least the ones without an av-input. off course that works with a few milli Watts only and doesn‘t have more than a few meters of range (in UHF), my AM-transmitter does have a tube HF-amp with ~ 20 Watts - on AM that should be good for a few kilometers

well, just don‘t have enough time right now, maybe i should look for a stereo-coder and a FM transmitter…

 

I was thinking in this direction:

I don’t believe it will be powerful enough to transmit beyond a few meters, so it would be perfect to use in combination with the Nokia 6510 with headset of course as antenna, or WM-F2095.

 

@Emiel I would not worry about one of these. The power is just too low to be of a real concern. I was stating the legal stuff just for reference, so people are aware of what they're doing (especially those that are not members of the forum).
Beyond that, it's everyone's responsibility about what they choose to do.