UK Vintage Radio Repair and Restoration

The information on these pages is based on my own experiences and opinions - it is not intended to be a definitive guide to the subject. As I live in the UK, the vast majority of the sets I work with are of British (or European) design and manufacture, so these pages will reflect this.

The Repair and Restoration section of this website is based on a series of articles I wrote for Electronics Today International magazine (April to August 1996). This magazine no longer exists in this form, having been taken over and merged with Everyday Practical Electronics, and back issues are no longer available.

My original text had to be edited significantly for magazine publication - these web pages are based on the unedited original version. However they have been considerably revised and updated to reflect my ongoing experience and the many helpful comments and contributions from visitors.

If you share my enjoyment of valve radios, have any comments, or perhaps a useful technique for overcoming a particular problem, I would be delighted to hear from you. I would like to thank those visitors have already contributed useful information, which has been added to the appropriate section of the site and suitably acknowledged. Also, if you would care to provide details and a photos of sets in your collection, to add to the Manufacturers & Sets section, I would be most grateful.

The circuit sections included on some pages have been scanned from the Trader service sheets for the relevant sets. In some cases the diagrams have been modified by removing some components that are not part of the current discussion, to improve clarity. The diagrams are included to illustrate the details being discussed only, and must not be relied upon when servicing sets. Photos of new components have been scanned from the catalogues of the suppliers mentioned.

Those who have visited this site regularly will be aware that the style and layout has changed a few times over its relatively short life.

The original site was an extension of our personal website, and used a simple menu on the front page that linked to the various sections. As the site grew this became impractical since visitors had to keep returning to the front page to find the link to the next page they wanted.

The second version (not in the web archive unfortunately) used a frames-based navigation system. This achieved the objective of improving the navigation. However not everybody likes frames and they cause problems for visitors who arrive at pages other than the main index, by following search engine links etc. Search engines do not like frames either, and the site had difficulty getting decent placings on the main ones. During the life of this second version, the site was moved from our personal webspace onto its own www.vintage-radio.com domain.

The third version (1999 - 2000) took advantage of a facility provided by the professional hosting company, namely Server Side Includes (SSI), which allows a single piece of HTML code to be included within another page simply by adding one line of code to reference it. This was used to include the navigation menu on every page, without having to manually add it to every page. The big advantage for me was that the menu could be easily changed by updating one file, and the updated version is displayed as part of every page automatically. The advantage for visitors are that there is no annoying frames, and the menu is displayed no matter what page the site is entered. I also used this feature to add the copyright notice to the bottom of every page.

The fourth (2001) version (again not in the web archive unfortunately) the navigation system changed to a drop-down menu system, similar to Windows Explorer. The reason for this is that the previous menu was becoming longer than some of the pages (the site now has over 100 pages), and visitors had to scroll quite a long way down to find things. The only drawback with this was that it uses JavaScript, and therefore didn't work with version 3 browsers.

In the current (2002-now) version the drop-down menu has been removed in favour of a back-to-basics system with separate contents pages for each main section. The reason for this is that some sections had too many pages to fit onto the drop-down menu on systems running at 800 x 600 resolution. Also I found it annoying having to scroll backup to the top of a page after reading it before I could go to the next page. I now have a link at the bottom of every page to take you back to the appropriate contents page, and many sections have Previous and Next page links on the bottom of the pages too. And anyway, I felt like a change!

At the end of 2002 the discussion forums were added, and have proved to be a popular addition. They were originally based on a freeware open source Perl script called YaBB but this proved to be inadequate to cope as the forum became more popular, so in December 2004 I moved it to the leading commercial forum software, vBulletin.

The website has been tested with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla Firefox 1 at resolutions of 1024 x 768 and 1400 x 1050. At lower resolutions (such as 800 x 600) you will find the layout is a bit cramped, but everything should still be visible.

For those who are interested in this sort of thing, the site is built and edited using Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 (an old version now, but perfectly adequate). Some of the text is written and edited using Microsoft Word 2003 (it's a good word processor but produces awful HTML code). The Javascript, Perl and SSI sections are done the hard way with UltraEdit (a programmers text editor), and the whole thing is tested with a local web server running Abyss Web Sever and ActivePerl.

Most of the photographs are tken with a Kodak digital camera, and all image manipulation and creation is done with Corel PhotoPaint 7 (which is now a very old version but I prefer it to the more recent versions).

This is all on a Dell Latitude D600 laptop PC with 1.7GHz Pentium M processor, 1GB of RAM and 40GB hard disk, running Windows XP Pro SP2. Bulk file storage is on a Windows 2003 based file server with 250GB of RAID storage space. We have a wireless network and broadband ADSL internet connection (the latter provided by Nildram who I can highly recommend).

We have been through several hosting companies over the last few years - too many to list! The main problems with many of them were reliability and technical support. We are now using and very happy with a "Reseller Plan 3" from 123 Reseller. This is used to host all our websites, as well as the BVWS and NVCF sites, and a few for friends.

Judging by the emails I received, many visitors to the website are looking for service data for specific sets. Although there are several suppliers of photocopied information, this is quite expensive and often takes some time to arrive. This prompted Pete Foden and me to produce our first Vintage Radio Service Data CD-ROM, which has been very popular with those who repair and restore sets regularly.

So popular in fact that I have now launched three more service data CD-ROMs and a Valve Data CD-ROM. Further CD-ROMs may be released in due course.

However the expense of a CD-ROM cannot always be justified by those who repair sets less frequently or who only need the service data for more problematic repairs. To hopefully satisfy this need I have launched a low cost Service Data by Email service.

I have accumulated a fair amount of vintage radio related information such as scanned documents, archive copies of websites that no longer exist etc. These don't fit in with this website but really should be available online somewhere. For this reason in August 2005 I launched a new Vintage Radio Information website. Currently there are a number of documents and an archive of Heathkit schematics, with more stuff coming soon. It will never be as organised as this site, but I hope it will be useful.

This website, including all text and images not otherwise credited, is copyright © 1997 - 2006 Paul Stenning.
No part of this website may be reproduced in any form without prior written permission from Paul Stenning.
All details are believed to be accurate, but no liability can be accepted for any errors.
The types of equipment discussed on this website may contain high voltages and/or operate at high temperatures.
Appropriate precautions must always be taken to minimise the risk of accidents.
Last updated 14th April 2006.