Magnavox Odyssey - soldering a cable to the board

[TheRealOC]

Morning all, 

 

I’m very close to getting my original Magnavox Odyssey console back to life – I’ve Frankenstein’d together a working power solution from an Atari 2600 after-market power adapter, with a travel adapter and a 3.5mm-to-2.5mm tip adapter. I also got a multicard from @Boojakascha and @Mikebloke (thanks guys ), and got a handle for it from Laserbear

 

The only remaining problem is the video cable. I mentioned previously in this post that original Odyssey RF cables are rarely listed for standalone eBay sales, and looking for other Odyssey pong consoles (100, 200 etc) with Magnavox’s weird proprietary RF connector hasn’t brought me any luck either. So I think the most practical solution would be to solder a new video cable to the back of the console’s main board, and that this cable will probably need to be at least 7 feet long. 

 

Question 1 (RF or composite?):

In this video (around the 54min20sec mark) That Tim Guy from YouTube, soldered video and ground directly to the console's motherboard but it's not clear (to me anyway) exactly what cable he's using - in the most recent comment at the top of his comments section, he refers to the cable as carrying a composite video signal. And I guess in theory it's possible that the console could maybe generate composite video on the board, and the original external RF box turned it back to RF?

 

But I'm a little bit confused by this as

1) I had always assumed a stock 1972 Odyssey only outputted RF,

2) I thought you could need something like @Boojakascha's mod board to output composite, and

3) later in the video, he appears to de-modulate the signal through a VCR to get to the CRT, which seems to suggest that the console itself is outputting RF. 

 

It's not going to make a huge difference to my setup - the Odyssey doesn't output sound, so either way, I'm going to be running a single cable with either an RCA or a coax connector. I have a well-shielded 7 foot RF video coaxial cable from Blue Jeans Cables (Belden 1505A) that I'm not using at the moment - does anyone know if this would be a good cable to use? If so, I could remove one of the connectors, and solder it to the two points on the board, as per the video. 

 

Question 2 (Safety)

 

The video from That Tim Guy is quite long, but the relevant part where he displays the cable solution is only from 52m50s to 54m40s

 

I don't know very much about soldering, and this would be the first mod I've tried myself, but I'm a little bit apprehensive because it seems like this should be more complicated than what's presented in the video (which shows that it's as simple as soldering two wires). It seems to me that there should usually be a little more to it than this. 

 

If he is pulling the video signal in this way and the youtube video isn't skipping over anything, does anyone have any opinion on whether wiring it directly in this way is creating a circuit that is safe, and not going to damage the console?

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Boojakascha]

Hello

Here are some answers:

1) Yes, TV RF cables have a specific impedance of 75 Ohms, which is fine for your application.

 

2) No, the voltage levels aren't right. You would go over a transistor and a capacitor, prior connecting the raw video signal to a TV. Please find the attached video: