More Pye Radios

 Pye VHF2D Continental

 

 Sold for something over £26 in 1958

A "PianoKey" set which were very popular in those days but not so with service engineers as a faulty piano key switch can render such a set scrap.

 Pye Model R33

 

 A modern looking set from 1961

 Pye Cambridge

 

  This a Pye Cambridge Model 1101 with Long, Medium, 2 Short and 5 Bandspead Shortwave bands reflecting growing interest in what was going on in the rest of the world.

It has 5 valves and was made for "universal" mains in 1963.

The term "universal" by then was a bit of a fraud and had long been so as DC mains were pretty rare if not long gone by 20 years! But a universal set had no mains transformer and as such could be manufactured for a lot less money than its AC equivalent. The downside was that they were not particularly safe; at least in theory. Nowadays a set like this would be verboten as it would not pass stringent modern safety regulations. Is this because people aren't as clever as they used to be? Maybe so.

 Pye Model Q7

 

 A early transistor portable from 1961, this example has been neatly converted to mains operation with the addition of a small plug-in mains power supply visible in the original battery compartment seen below.

 

 

 
 On the inside of the rear cover is the model number and battery information.

Pye Model AC4D from 1931

 
 

 Below, the valves and power supply can be seen after detaching two of its three aluminium covers. These are a pair of B5-based MS4 tetrodes with anode top caps and a relatively rare catkin type MH4 (a fellow of which was the cause of several cuts and bruises received when I was repairing a neighbours radio back in the mid-1950s.. that valve didn't have the perforated metal cover.. just the bare metal tubular anode sitting at 250 volts and I'd grasped it firmly to remove it with the radio turned on). On the right is the output valve an ML4.

 

 I puzzled over the picture above trying to see how much rotation it needed to correct my sloppy photography. I usually need to add or subtract up to a couple of degrees to get a picture looking OK but in this case, I discovered the problem was a distorted chassis.

You can see the bottom edge doesn't line up with the cabinet and the whole thing is leaning to the right, and here at the side the wavechange switch (below right) isn't quite right.

 

 A keen eye should spot the early labelling on the wavechange bezel. Back around 1930 broadcasts were using two ranges of wavelegths termed long and short. What we know today as short waves had been considered pretty useless for broadcasting until amateur radio enthusiasts and others realised short waves chiefly spanned thousands of miles. Around 1933 gve or take a year or two the term "short waves" was re-named "medium waves" and the newly discovered (true) short waveband, suddenly became full of high power long range transmissions occupying several new defined bands.. 49m, 31m, etc etc.

 

At much the same time international agreements firmed up the broadcast frequencies of stations, which resulted in radios adopting brand new tuning dials labelled with exotic sounding station names. In fact the design of radio sets changed quite dramatically with the tuning dial now being the key feature instead of being a bit anonymous

This old Pye was one of the last domestic sets to use a plain dial.

 

 

 Above is a view with the upper aluminium cover detached showing the area assigned for the tuning condenser (a three gang affair), coils for its two wavebands. When I get round to overhauling this receiver the first job will be to square it up because as you can see here something isn't quite right... Could it have been sloppiness by Captain Seddon or a later dabbler?

 

 

  more to follow...
 

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