Sixties TV - WLEX WKYT WBLG WTVQ WHTN WSAZ LEX 18 1960S Remote Controls

TV IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND

With wireless remote control you can tune your set from across the room

Tired out by those hikes to the television set to change channels and adjust the volume? Then we at SixtiesTV.com recommend a set with wireless remote control. You'll have to pay a bit extra - normally from $40 to $100 - for the privilege of being lazy. But nearly one TV set buyer out of every 10 is willing to pay the money. For this extra cash, you get a special set with a hand-held unit, not much bigger than a cigarette pack, which tunes your set from your easy chair - and you don't get tangled in a mess of wires either. The very simplest remote units just change channels and turn the picture on and off by wireless. The so-called "dual-function" units also let you adjust the volume without getting up. Then there are some really elaborate ones - such as RCA's color-TV tuner, which adjusts tint and color as well as volume and channel. A Zenith "home entertainment center" has a Space Command remote control which tunes radio and phonograph sound as well as television, and changes records as well as channels. One Hoffman remote has a button labeled "zoom" which give you a close-up of the action in the center of the picture. The fairly steep price of a remote-control set results primarily from the fact that the set itself must be of special design. It must have motors or relays to turn knobs you would normally turn by hand. And it must have a built in "remote receiver" to pick up instructions from the hand-held unit and translate them into automatic knob-twists. The remote receiver usually has four to eight tubes. You can't install remote control yourself in an ordinary TV set. However, you can operate a remote-control set manually, although it isn't nearly as much fun. There are two basic types of wireless systems. The older type is actually a tiny battery-operated radio station (in the hand-held unit), with a radio receiver built into the television cabinet. The station is just powerful enough to send impulses to the set, where the special receiver chassis picks them up, decodes them and tunes the set. The radio-operated controls - such as those used in Emerson, Sylvania and some General Electric sets - are bug-free. But when this type first came into use, it played some unexpected pranks. Apartment-house neighbors with remote-control sets often became involved in an electronic war of nerves - each one switching the other's TV channels - for radio waves are no respecters of walls. Some automatic garage-door openers work on the same radio principal (and frequencies). Occasionally, a hopped-up TV remote control used to go berserk, and garage doors would flap all over the neighborhood. The second basic type works by ultrasonic sound. The frequency usually selected is about 40,000 cycles per second (people normally hear sounds only as high as 15,000 cycles). The hand-held tuners for some ultrasonic remotes are very simple, with no batteries, transistors, wires or electricity. Controls like those built by Admiral, Motorola, Zenith and others contain precision-tooled metal bars which are struck by tiny hammers when the viewer presses the channel-change or volume button. Just like a tuning fork, this produces a "clink." The basic note is so high you can't hear it - but your television set can. You can recognize an ultrasonically tuned set by the tiny microphone grille mounted in the front. This mike "hears" the sound, feeds it to a detecting system which activates the motors. Ultrasonic systems have had their troubles, too. The rattling of keys, a squeaky door hinge or a rocking chair sometimes produced sounds with overtones just right to change channels. About a year ago, a serviceman was called because a remote-control set kept changing channels without apparent cause. He discovered that when the family canary was put in another room, the trouble stopped. The overtones of its high pitched chirp had kept the channels switching. A hospital patient once discovered that his rented TV set switched channels when he squeezed a plastic deodorant bottle. Actually, the squeeze-bottle was producing an unheard sound of the right frequency for the remote-control circuit. It probably is a coincidence, but two brands of TV sets actually have plastic squeeze-bottles in their wireless tuners. Instead of tuning forks, Magnavox and Silvertone (Sears, Roebuck) have plastic air chambers in their units. When you press the button, you force air through an ultrasonic whistle in the mouth of a dress-up squeeze-bottle and poof! - there goes What's My Line?. Remote-control units don't do everything. Most of them turn the picture and sound on and off but don't turn the set on and off. This is because some power must be fed to the remote chassis in the set to begin with, so that it can receive the signals from the hand-held unit. Even this problem is being overcome. RCA's black-and-white remote unit turns the power off, but you have to turn it on by hand. A new Admiral remote-control receiver uses seven transistors instead of tubes. They require so little power that the receiver may be left on all the time. In designing wireless remote-control units, TV manufactures have overcome most major shortcomings. But this problem remains: the tiny units are easy to misplace. There are no statistics on how many tuners have been lost behind sofa cushions, how many soggy ones have turned up in the wash, or how many dogs have munched on them while channels changed in cadence with crunching canine teeth.

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