JVC S-VHS dropout comets, tracking creep, VHS fine?
 

I've seen a lot of things, but never this. :question:

Acquired a non-working SR-V101 deck in trade, good refurb candidate. Had gunk on lower stationary head cylinder. Cleaned that off. Some transport ingest/eject issues, also caused by grime and bad lube. Alignment was shot, way off, wouldn't even lock SP. Adjusted guides, better now. An "easy" job, but time-consuming as usual, took many hours.

The unit meets my A+ criteria for tracking EP mode VHS tapes. Auto-tracking is spot-on almost every time now. The image is clean, audio clear. This is actually an unusually nice JVC deck! So the heads appear to be fine -- better than fine.

But on S-VHS and S-VHS-ET tapes, it suffers from dropout comets on screen (tracking based?). Then tracking creep, both sides randomly. Then loss of v-hold. Repeat.

The VHS is perfect.

How could only S-VHS be affected? :screwy:

Did you try those S-VHS tapes on the composite output? not the Y/C socket.

What does the comets look like? If you have a service remote, adjusting the SVHS frequency response setting could maybe have an impact. I haven't touched it on a JVC as I don't have the service remote or remote codes for it (if anyone has remote codes let me know.) but I've done a similar adjustment on a panasonic deck where it's done with trimpots. If there is some component drift it can affect the filter on the raw RF signal which these settings adjust. I don't know if this would affect tracking though.