Quote:
Originally Posted by linescan87
It seems I indeed have a very rare and valuable set in this A774, possibly one of only a handful left in working order. I shall treasure it dearly! Haha!! (According to that Bush slogan "I'm set for life!")
John Joe.
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I reckon your A774 must be very rare. It's an Irish-manufactured version with VHF and UHF tuning. Looks like it has a varicap tuner unit? Sadly, 625 line monochrome TVs - even fairly rare ones - don't seem to be particularly valuable as yet, but I'd say it's worth keeping.
I do have a couple of A774's in my collection. One came from Neil29 last year. I got it working - see this thread
https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/...d.php?t=138858
Main faults were a leaky capacitor in the frame stage and broken plastic parts in the tuner mechanism. Heatercathodeshort kindly sent me some spare parts, and earlier this year, gave me another A774 set, a 20" Murphy in a white cabinet which isn't in great condition. Also the CRT is marked. I haven't restored this one yet.
I'm a bit nostalgic about these A774 sets. Back in the late 1970s my parents rented a Murphy A774 from Hooper and Son in Brislington, Bristol. It was fairly unreliable even then, rarely lasting more than 3 months before needing repair. Sometimes we were loaned another TV while it was away being repaired. A couple of times we got a Ferguson BRC 1500 with the piano-key tuner. Despite the 1500's reputation for poor picture quality, it seemed better than the A774 to me. Finally in late 1979 the Murphy A774 went bang just as "Top of the Pops" was about to start. I was very annoyed that I missed the show, but every cloud has a silver lining. Hoopers took away the dead Murphy A774 for repair and loaned us a Philips G11 colour TV instead. We were so impressed that we asked if we could keep it. A deal was done with the shop and the Philips G11 was ours. I expect the shop rejoiced and deposited the old A774 in the nearest dustbin. The G11 proved much more reliable, averaging 1 failure every 2 years.