GEC 2147 Television

The GEC 2147 Television was a compact BAKELITE TRF table set with a 9 inch CRT. It was a major rival to the BUSH TV22 and used the same two level construction to save space. It was not as good as the TV22 because unlike the TV22 it cannot be re-tuned, but then it did pre-date the TV22 by a couple of months.

I bought my set at the Birmingham collectors fair a few years ago for £160. After replacing two missing valves I powered the set up only to find that the tube was gassey. On closer inspection it can be seen that the Getter was never evaporated during manufacture. I will try to see if I can find someone to activate it for me.

For the time being I have fitted an MW22-16 tube. I am still having problems with this set. An apparent lopty fault turned out to be a heater-cathode leakage in the boost diode, with this replaced I got a raster.

Infact after all the usual capacitor replacement and fitting a second line output transformer it produced pictures - for a while. Well the pictures were dim and the second line transformer soon failed. A true lemon!

The ilumination at the back of the gassey tube.

The un-evaporated getter.

A picture, at last!