Phil's Valve Radio Site

Welcome to this website featuring a pastime hobby, based about my home built Vintage Radios. As well as walking and cycling I have been into Electronics for the past 50 years and I built my first working Radio from a Philips Electronic Kit, A popular educational toy during my childhood days of the 1960s and early seventies. I also got mine as a Christmas present in 1971 when I was only 10 years old. As time progressed this kit learnt me how to read schematic circuit diagrams and I started buying Bernard's Radio books where I had a go at various radio circuits ranging from crystal set projects to regenerative transistor receivers. My first early projects where built on wooden base board using screw techniques until my mum bought me my first soldering iron in 1973. My soldering in those days was very messy and some of my projects would ether work or become abandoned. When I first stared work in 1977/78 my job was working with circuit boards and as a result my soldering and wiring skills greatly improved. I then got my own outdoor work shop as my early days of electronics was the kitchen table as was the living room which saw burnt carpets with solder splashes. Tandy UK owned by Radioshack in America was our local town electronics store and I successfully built many of there great kits which ranged from a regenerative shortwave receiver featured in pictures 1 and 2 to there Hi Fi IC FM Tuner which worked superb and gave me many happy years during the 1980s music era when Radio was as it should be today. As my days of cycle touring during the mid 1980s to early 90s was at a high I lost interest for a short while but in late 1990 when my budget was reasonable I started building superhet receivers using solid state devices based on FET Transistors and IC Integrated Circuits. As a result my skills in understanding radio improved and as was a new revival of the Valve era during that period I started building valve amplifiers. The valve amplifier in picture 3 was built during 1995 and early 1996. It was a kit Maplin Electronics featured based on the Mullard 5-20 Hi Fi amplifier of the 1950s. Like Tandy, Maplin was another great electronics super store which gradually went into decline and as a result ceased trading during 2018. Picture 5 is my first valve superhet receiver I first constructed in 1998 and saw many experiments until its final construction during summer 2011. The following year 1999 saw my first experiments building FM receivers and after several not so good attempts I had a go at this design during the winter of 2005/6 which can be found at the following link Pulse Counting Receiver . The website in question is an excellent Australian website run by a very experienced radio technician and his site features all you need to know about the design of both solid state and valve receivers of all kinds. This receiver in question is featured in pictures 6 to11 which forms my simple Hi Fi System and still works very well today. As a result of building his FM radio design I had a go at several of my own designs which are featured on this website which have been very successful and the solid state design featured in picture 13 is an example. Picture 11 and 12 feature a 2 valve regenerative receiver which the chassis was constructed in 1993 to form a version of this receiver using very small acorn valves. Over the years this receiver was upgraded using modern EL84 and ECF82 valves and this version was the first project to be introduced on this website when it started back in Spring 2006.