Seiko TV Watch

Nothing can ruin art and inspiration like money can

When I was in 3rd or 4th grade, our science textbook at school featured a picture of the Seiko T001.

https://museum.syssrc.com/artifact/mobile/900/

I can't recall if that's the first place I laid eyes on one, but I remember becoming almost obsessed with it.  I later saw the watch featured in the movie Dragnet, and much later (though it was a much older film) in the film Octopussy.

There are plenty of sites such as the one above that tell the story of the watch much better than I can, so I'm not going to duplicate that effort.  The truth is I didn't really know the history of the watch and it didn't much matter to me either.  The fact of the matter is that in 1982 Seiko made a working television screen the size of a wristwatch face.

When I was young, the miniaturization of technology was awe inspiring.  It opened our eyes to what was possible and made an incredible promise out of the future.  It felt like every year we were closer to flying cars and wearing computers on our wrists.  Pleasure cruises to the moon were a mere generation away.

But something happened on the way to the future.  Maybe every generation looks at this progression and formulates a similar sentiment, but what the heck happened?  And the answer is simple.  Money happened.  There was no follow-up to the Seiko T001 because progressing the state of the art was not as profitable as maintaining the status quo.  Sure 30-some odd years later we have "smart" watches now - but those aren't the successor to the T001 - they're the product of an entirely different way of thinking.  The technology doesn't exist now for for the sake of showing us what's possible, it exists to keep us paying for services.  Am I being cynical?  Probably, but am I wrong? I don't think so.

Enough grousing about the good ol' days that never were and back to story time.

Buying a T001

What's really weird about looking these up on Ebay is that the term "Seiko TV Watch" yields a lot of results that aren't what you're looking for.  Evidently there is a style of analog watch face that resembles the shape of an old TV set, so the vast majority of your results will be these.  Even so there is almost always a T001 up for sale on Ebay.  Don't let anyone tell you they're rare - they definitely aren't.  They're expensive because they're desirable, not scarce.

I recently had the pleasure of acquiring a Seiko T001 and it's everything I ever hoped it would be.
Buying it was actually kind of a fun experience with a couple of twists.

The whole thing consists of the watch, a pair of headphones and a receiver unit.  Most of the listings I had seen for these were missing the black foam pads from the headphones, making them look neglected and incomplete.  Occasionally the seller would offer some verbiage to the effect that the foam had disintegrated with age.  The one I bought had the foam intact in the images, and I was looking forward to getting a truly complete set.  Well, I got my foam pads alright...  Whatever material was used to make the foam back then becomes brittle over time and the vibration from being shipped caused what was left of the foam pads to basically explode in black grit all over the interior of the package.  It was pretty comical when it arrived.  I spent the first 20 minutes with the watch carefully extracting black crumbs from all its crevices.

Getting it To Work

After getting everything cleaned up, I decided to throw some batteries into it and see what it did. That's when I discovered that someone had left batteries installed into the receiver and they had predictably leaked.  Fortunately only one of the battery contacts was corroded and after a good scrubbing with some Deoxit and a toothbrush everything seemed to work just fine.

As many articles about the watch will attest, you can't really do a lot with it now because there are no more over-the-air analog TV broadcasts, and the receiver for the watch doesn't have video-in ports.  This has led a lot of people to state in the listing that it doesn't actually work anymore.  Apparently some people buy these just to collect them, and that's cool, but I bought mine to USE it. (This despite the fact that it's so wildly impractical).  So step two was figuring out how to get a video image onto the screen.

Like most portable radio receivers from the era, the headphones do double-duty as an antenna loop.  Searching around the Internet I came across a couple of accounts where people had managed to pipe a video signal into the watch by means of a cheap RF Modulator and a couple of plug adapters to convert the coaxial (type F) connector to RCA and then RCA to the phono plug used by headphones.  After fiddling around a lot with different connections, I eventually got the whole RF Modulator+adapters thing to work work by soldering a "matching transformer" (like this one https://www.amazon.com/RCA-VH54R-Matching-Transformer-VH54R/dp/B00005T3EY) inline.  I'm guessing the lower resistance of the direct connection was overpowering the tuner.  But even with that setup, the picture was very fiddly and I could never get it stable for more than a second or two.

My Own TV Station

Which led me to plan B.  Rather than wire something directly to the receiver and possibly shorten it's operational life in the process, I thought "How hard could it be to broadcast a TV signal?"   The simple answer is that it would have been a lot easier had I been trying to do it 5 to 10 years ago.  At one point in the recent past there were plentiful cheap supplies of devices like this: https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/unknown_video_sender_ut_66.html, (it's basically a box that takes an AV signal and broadcasts it very short range on a UHF channel) but I couldn't find one anywhere for love or money in the couple weeks I searched.

There are a lot of similar looking devices which only transmit between a sender and receiver and not directly to a TV, so it would be very easy to accidentally buy the wrong thing.  In general you want to avoid anything that says it's 2.4ghz or comes in two pieces.

Several times I came across a device description which seemed to be what I wanted but then had to spend an hour trying to confirm.  Because there are so many listing aggregators, the Internet has basically become one big echo chamber of product descriptions so you may find a hundred different search results for a particular device only to find that 75 of them point back to a single old listing.  I have a feeling that the supposedly questionable legality of some of these devices led to their function not being openly advertised - the idea being that if you didn't already know what the device did you'd have to have a conversation with someone to find out.  Unfortunately it seems like most of the people who knew exactly what these devices did just moved on when the technology became outdated, and the people left selling them are largely clueless.

I did finally stumble across a compact device that sends a UHF TV signal on Ebay. but I managed to find something a bit better (in my opinion) beforehand. 

Phil's Old Radios: https://antiqueradio.org/HomeTVTransmitter.htm is an old-timey website dedicated to the preservation of old electronics and he happened to share his solution for getting a picture onto these sets after the fall of analog television broadcasts.  I have a lot of admiration for people who do this sort of thing.  Phil's website describes using a Blonder-Tongue modulator and an antenna to send a TV signal that will cover a small area.  While this is functionally equivalent and much bulkier than the all-in-one unit I saw on Ebay, it occurred to me that a piece of professional equipment was probably going to be more reliable, adjustable and repairable.  As far as I can tell the original use of these Blonder-Tongue devices was to push internal CATV channels to multiple TVs in schools and hotels, so the output is quite strong in order to push a signal across long cable runs.  It took some time to sort through the available listings to find the right thing and a decent price.  The original MSRP on these was nearly $2000 but they're frequently sold for between $30 and $100.  I found one for around $40.

[Update, this "AoE Spy RF Modulator" will also do the trick.  It's not quite as good as the Blonder-Tongue, but it's way easier to get and much more convenient to use.] 

When the modulator and antenna arrived in the mail, it was a simple matter of plugging the antenna into the modulator's output terminal and setting the VHF channel I wanted to use with the modulator controls.  After I confirmed that I could pick up the signal being sent with a regular old CRT television, I fired up the T001 and started trying to dial it in.

The Payoff

After that it only took a couple of minutes fiddling with the tuner to get a solid picture on the watch.  The range was only around 20-30 feet but that was more than enough to fulfill my longtime dream of watching The Transformers on a Seiko TV watch.  It just doesn't get any more 80's than that.

Update: Trying to find replacement foam pads that matched the originals was pretty tough.  There are tons of ultra-cheap foam earpad replacements available and 99.9% of them are exactly the same - thin, flimsy and completely curved.  It took quite a lot of searching but I eventually found one that's almost a perfect match for the originals.  SoundLab makes (made?) a set of foam earpads that are thick and semi-squared around the edges like the original Seiko earpads.  I've yet to find where to buy just the single set of black pads, but the sets are still available relatively cheaply.  There are several places to buy them as of this writing.