I had very little money, but I did want to toy with television technology. My oscilloscope was a DeVry Technical Institute tube type, with recurrent sweep (as opposed to triggered sweep), which made it difficult to capture signals. I was given an old TV with no picture… so I pulled the horizontal & vertical signals from the circuitry, sync’d the ‘scope’s horizontal to the horizontal retrace pulse, drove the vertical with a pulse borrowed from the vertical drive (which was a challenge, because most places in the circuit, it was highly nonlinear, but I found one where it was reasonably linear), and fed the raw video signal to the intensity modulation input on the rear… and recreated, for a brief moment, a full image on the ‘scope! Then I slipped with my probe, popped a high voltage capacitor, and lost the signal. For years, I sought a replacement capacitor, until such time when I could find one, I realized that I hadn’t documented which capacitor had failed, or what its value was. Sigh. Oh well, it served its purpose.
