Obsolete Technology Tellye !: VOXSON MOD. T416 YEAR 1965.

The VOXSON MOD. T416 is a portable 16 inches B/W television with VHF and UHF channels selectors.

Was first compact television from VOXSON using a 112° degree B/W CRT TUBE,

Furthermore it was first VOXSON using a NUVISTOR in the VHF channels selector.

VOXSON was an Italian manufacturer site in Rome in Italy.

It was founded in 1952 by the engineer Arnaldo Piccinini with the name FARET, which stays for Fabbrica Apparecchi Radio e Televisione S.p.A..

The activity begun with radio and television fabrication factory.

It have had almost an immediate success on the market and at the end of the 1950's it have great penetration in the market with lot of sales even in extra market such as Germany.

With some unclear involvements in the 1980's VOXSON was sinking , and with classics Italian industry destroy style it was treatened like a tennis ball between that and this guy and mate; and all of this degraded rapidly the original identity of this industry.

Today VOXSON is selling LCD crap like many others with parts coming from there and there.

The destiny of such industry seems all around the same.

(To see the Internal Chassis Just click on Older Post Button on bottom page, that's simple !)

A good point on good old B/W Televisions.....................

The Sixties was a time of great change for TV. At the start of the decade there were just monochrome sets with valves, designed for 405 -line transmissions at VHF. By the end there was 625 -line colour at UHF, with transistorised chassis that used the odd IC.

The following decade was one of growth. The "space race" had begun in 1957, when the USSR launched Sputnik 1 and terrified the Americans. Thereafter the USA began to spend countless billions of dollars on space missions. This got underway in earnest in the Sixties, with the announcement that America would be going all out to get a man on the moon by the end of the decade. There followed the Mercury series of earth - orbit missions, then the Apollo launches. Success was achieved in 1969. Most of these missions were televised, and in those days anything to do with space was hot stuff. It was inevitable that everyone wanted to have a television set. At the time an average receiver would be a monochrome one with a 14in. tube - there was no colour until 1967. It would cost about 75 guineas.
TV sets were often priced in guineas (21 shillings) as it made the price look a bit easier on the pocket. Anyway 75 guineas, equivalent to about £78.75 in 2000's currency, was a lot of money then. For those who couldn't, rental was a good option. The Sixties was a period of tremendous growth for rental TV.
Much else was rented at that time, even radios, also washing machines, spin driers, refrigerators and, later on, audio tape recorders (no VCRs then).
For most people these things were too expensive for cash purchase.
There were no credit cards then. And when it came to a TV set, the question of reli- ability had to be taken into account: renting took care of repair costs.

TV reliability.........The TV sets of the period were notoriously unreliable. They still used valves, which meant that a large amount of heat was generated. The dropper resistor contributed to this: it was used mainly as a series device to reduce the mains voltage to the level required to power the valve heaters. These were generally connected in series, so the heater volt- ages of all the valves were added together and the total was subtracted from the mains voltage. The difference was the voltage across the heater section of the dropper resistor, whose value was determined by simple application of Ohm's Law.
As valves are voltage -operated devices, there was no need to stabilise the current. So the power supply circuits in TV sets were very simple. They often consisted of nothing more than a dropper resistor, a half or biphase rectifier and a couple of smoothing capacitors. If a TV set had a transformer and a full wave rectifier in addition to the other components, it was sophisticated!
As the valve heaters were connected in series they were like Christmas -tree lights: should one fail they all went out and the TV set ceased to function. Another common problem with valves is the cathode -to -heater short. When this fault occurs in a valve, some of the heaters in the chain would go out and some would stay on. Those that stayed on would glow like search- lights, often becoming damaged as a result. Dropper failure could cause loss of HT (dead set with the heaters glowing), or no heater supply with HT present. When the HT rectifier valve went low emission, there was low EHT, a small picture and poor performance all round. CRTs would go soft or low emission, the result being a faint picture, or cathode -to -heater short-circuit, the result this time being uncontrollable brightness. On average a TV set would have twelve to fourteen valves, any one of which could go low -emission or fail in some other way. All valves have a finite life, so each one would probably have to be replaced at one time or another. The amount of heat generated in an average TV set would dry out the capacitors, which then failed. So you can see why people rented!

The CRT could cause various problems. Because of its cost, it was the gen- eral practice to place its heater at the earthy end of the chain. In this position it was less likely to be overloaded by a heater chain fault. But during the winter months, when the mains voltage dropped a bit, it would be starved of power. This would eventually lead to 'cathode poi- soning' with loss of emission. The 'cure' for this was to fit a booster transformer designed to overrun the heater by 10, 20 or 30 per cent. It would work fine for a while, until the CRT completely expired. At about this time CRT reactivators came into being - and a weird and wonderful collection of devices they turned out to be. Regunned tubes also started to appear. You couldn't do this with the `hard -glass' triode tubes made by Emitron. These were fitted in a number of older sets. Yes, they were still around, at least during the early Sixties.

Developments................... A great deal of development occurred during the Sixties. Many TV sets and radios made in the early Sixties were still hard -wired: the introduction of the printed circuit board changed the construction of electronic equipment forever. The first one was in a Pam transistor radio. PCBs were ideal for use in transistor radios, because of the small size of the components used and the fact that such radios ran almost cold.
They were not so good for use with valve circuitry, as the heat from the valves caused all sorts of problems. Print cracks could develop if a board became warped. If it became carbonised there could be serious leakage and tracking problems. In addition it was more difficult to remove components from a PCB. Many technicians at that time didn't like PCBs. As the Sixties progressed, transistors took over more and more in TV sets. They first appeared in a rather random fashion, for example in the sync separator stages in some Pye models. Then the IF strip became transistorised. Early transistors were based on the use of germanium, which was far from ideal.

The change to silicon produced devices that were more robust and had a better signal-to-noise ratio.
Car radios became fully transistorised, and 'solid-state' circuitry ceased to be based on earlier valve arrangements. Many hi-fi amplifiers had been transistorised from the late Fifties, and all tape recorders were now solid-state.
Both reel-to-reel and compact -cassette recorders were available at this time. Initially, audio cassette recorders had a maximum upper frequency response of only about 9kHz.
To increase it meant either a smaller head gap or a faster speed. Philips, which developed the compact audio cassette and holds the patents for the design (which we still use in 2000!) wouldn't allow an increase in speed. Good reel-to-reel recorders had a fre- quency response that extended to 20kHz when the tape speed was 15in./sec.
This is true hi-fi. In time the frequency response of compact -cassette recorders did improve, because of the use of better head materials with a smaller gap.
This led to the demise of the reel-to-reel audio recorder as a domestic product We began to benefit from spin-offs of the space race between the USA and the USSR.
The need to squeeze as much technology as possible into the early computers in the Mercury space capsules used by the USA lead to the first inte- grated circuits.
This technology soon found its way into consumer equipment. Often these devices were hybrid encap- sulations rather than true chips, but they did improve reliability and saved space. The few chips around in those days were analogue devices. To start with most UHF tuners used valves such as the PC86 and PC88. They were all manually tuned. Some had slow-motion drives and others had push -buttons. They didn't have a lot of gain, so it was important to have an adequate aerial and use low -loss cable..............................