Single Sync Woes

[Bruce Davis]

See comments below.

Ryan L. Kitchen wrote:

> I recently acquired a very interesting piece of equipment: A very 
> large single sync monitor with 3 (RGB) bnc connections on the back. It 
> is marked as a Digital brand model VRT19-HA, but it is also marked as 
> a GDM-1961 which I am told indicates the touch of sony? not that it 
> matters....


GDM does indicate that this is a Sony CRT. 

> At any rate, I have a five connector bnc to 15 pin vga cable and i'm 
> ready to roll... or am I. It is not a multi sync monitor, it is very 
> picky about the vertical and horizontal refresh rates. In good ol' 
> Solaris and linux et al you can manually choose these things. I'm sure 
> it would work fine on my sparc with my handy dandy 13w3 adapter...but 
> i want to use this thing on a pc. I have a geforce 2 256. I also have 
> a GeForce 4 Ti4200 that is waiting for a power supply and case to 
> power the M.B. that will hold it. I have heard this monitor requires a 
> video card that can support a refresh rate of 130 cycles ... I know 
> the Geforce 2 goes at least to 120... I'm not sure about the GF4. 


This seems rather high.  In my last job, I worked with many SGI 
monitors, including single and multisync versions.  When we would attach 
a multisync monitor to a box designed for a single sync monitor, the 
multisync monitor adjusted properly and displayed the image correctly at 
75 hz.

> Basically, I am hardware oriented, but I've never really taken a 
> monitor apart or done any significant modifications. I also understand 
> how a capacitor works and how large the ones are in CRT based devices 
> (such as monitors and tv's). I would prefer to be alive. With all this 
> in mind, can anyone enlighten me? I don't really want to buy any other 
> video cards, as I have 2 very nice ones already... but is there a home 
> made solution to get this thing running? I just don't seem to have 
> very many resources. yes I have soldering iron and the necessary know 
> how...


I don't think you need to do anything that drastic.  I did a quick 
google search on GDM-1961 and found the following as the first result 
returned:

Solutions to make ANY MONITOR work on a PC or MAC
http://www.si87.com/MonitorSolutions/sony/gdm1961.html

It looks like you want a sync converter ($50).

I'm sure there are other solutions.

> Many thanks,
> Ryan K.


Bruce Davis
Medford, MA