I remember the heartache I felt as a thirteen year old technology mad young boy when I was too scared to ask for a Sinclair Pocket television. Had I not received a ZX Spectrum 16K for my birthday I may of had the courage to ask for the £80 black and white pocket television. At that time £80 was a significant proportion of a weekly wage.
The brilliant mind of Sir Clive Sinclair fascinated me, and getting a television into such a small package totally blew my mind. I don't think I was completely obsessed with television programs, I was kept very busy with orchestras and choir and all sorts of things. I did have a fascination for how things worked, this led to fate choosing between a career in architecture or industrial design. Fate dealt me a cruel blow and I was directed towards the industrial design pathway. In the third year my fascination with everything Sinclair ended with me writing my dissertation on "Was the Sinclair C5 a Design or Marketing Failure". I remember arguing that it was indeed a marketing not a design failure.
In the past few months I was browsing through eBay and noticed that Sinclair TV's we not going for amazing amounts of money. In fact the average was around £20. The fourteen year old inside me lit up and thought, even if it doesn't work, I can fulfil that teenage boys fantasy of owning a super mini monochrome television. After a couple of weeks of watching I found what looked like a good example and took the plunge. One week later this incredibly well wrapped parcel arrived. Like a forensic archaeologist I peeled back the layers bubble wrap to be greeted with my childhood dream.
Now Sinclair's second pocket TV used a rare and now out of production battery. Having had a good look around these batteries were definitely no longer available. Thankfully, the unit had a power socket which takes six volts with a negative central pin. A amazon purchase later of a variable voltage power supply allowed me to finally turn it on.
No picture, well actually not true, five to seven pictures if you looked really closely. As I said at the start of the piece, the analogue signal is no longer broadcast in the UK so I was having to generate my own signal, which I will describe in a following post. What to do now, not too sure, the electron gun was definitely working and was generating an image. Fortunately a colleague introduced me to their neighbour who is a full radio ham licence holder here in the UK. I learned that he'd come from a television repair background so I enquired whether this would be a project in his field. Long story short, two weeks later my colleague returns with a working TV. I thought one of the capacitors had failed, but it appears that the oscillator had drifted off frequency. Resetting the frequency has now brought the image all back into line.
Turns out that my colleague has a very good eye. Whilst out at a ham fair with her neighbour she spotted one of the original Sinclair Televisions. Apart from a broken battery holder which was surprisingly easy to replace with a quick look on eBay the TV is actually working. This was an amazing find, being one third of the price on average they were being sold for. When the first Sinclair TV didn't work I actually hedged my bets and purchased a second one, that arrived a few weeks later, in fact on the day Sir Clive Sinclair died. Unfortunately or fortunately the picture didn't work in the same way as the original. The fault looking exactly the same so I've donated it again to my very most excellent radio ham friend of a friend.
So of the 14,000 sets created I have possibly two that are working. Don't know if number two is fixed or can be but I'm more than thrilled to now own a piece of technological history.
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