| This very early transistor portable was bought for £3 in late August 01 and must have been a once treasured possession as it came complete with a service sheet and an instruction leaflet. Very worn and with a piece of string for a handle it has clearly had lots and lots of use. It isn't included in Radio & TV Servicing so I'm not sure of its date. I guess it's 1957, and is one of the first transistor portables. |
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The ancient all PnP germanium transistor line-up which originate from Newmarket/Pye is worth quoting:- Frequency changer.....V6/R4M 1st IF amplifier...........V6/R2 2nd IF amplifier..........V6/R2 Audio amplifier...........V10/50B Output.........................2 x V10/30A Conveniently it uses 4 x U11 batteries. It tunes the medium waveband and has a single preset longwave station. Neutralisation, or the stability of the circuit was a problem in the early days because of internal feedback paths within the early transistors and its data sheet goes into the procedure with lots of detail. |
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It appears that this set is quite interesting. The first British transistor portable was designed by Pye and marketed under their PAM subsidiaries label as the "PAM710". When it seemed that transistor sets may come to be accepted Pye then sold them, slightly redesigned, under their own name as the "P123BQ". My set has the Pye front panel, with the same "Transistor" badge but fitted into a heavyweight picnic-portable style rexine-covered wooden case. As with the Pye model this uses six transistors, saving two over the PAM's eight. This was achieved by having a self-oscillating mixer and using a diode detector. Strange that none of these three receivers had a proper name? It was as if the drive behind these things was led by engineering rather than marketing. Not a lot of imagination... let's call it the "Model 710"; the "P123BQ; the "Transistor Portable Model 30"... yawn. Stilll... most other British radio manufacturers did the same. Not all though... some UK firms such as Ever Ready chose names rather than security codes and Grundig in line with most other European and Asian manufacturers coined all sorts of names for their sets... Micro-Boy, Yacht-Boy etc. |
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