[trh01uk]

Well, I am disappointed that no-one on here apparently has anything to contribute on the topic. My question is not particularly about Dave Hick's or his particular collection of stuff - and more about whether the whole area of "private mobile radio" which sprang up after WWII is of any importance historically?

My own evaluation is that Pye was a particularly sleepy company, and when it eventually died out - it had only itself to blame for failing to innovate. When I joined in the mid-70s, I think it had been turning out the essentially the same radio for decades. Sure, it moved from all valve equipment, with rotary convertors or vibrator power packs to fully transistor and then transistor+IC sets - but it followed the technology rather than set the pace.

I only stayed in the company four years because I was given something interesting and innovative to do - namely introduce frequency synthesisers into an industry permanently wedded to quartz crystals. Indeed, the Pye group included a quart crystal company in the group - Cathodeon - which some may remember.

Not that I am singling out Pye in particular. Most of the companies in the field appear to have been pretty dead in the water too - Dymar, Cleartone, Marconi to name a few. Motorola was perhaps an exception - though I have no first hand knowledge of them. I do recall seeing in the late 70s, the first sets which had broadband stages in them requiring no tuning. They came up with sets that could cover the entire VHF band (148 - 174MHz) without needing tuning to a small sub-band. That tuning procedure was the bane of a service engineers life - every set Pye produced had to have its entire receiver front-end and transmitter strip tuned to the particular area of the band the set covered.

Innovation was perhaps evident when making very small sets - the walkie-talkies - much loved by the police, etc. I don't know whether Pye was responsible for driving forward the use of "radial" component layouts to replace the "axial" layouts. Both are now totally obsolete, now we are all surface mount, with much functionality hidden inside ICs. But at one time, standing components like resistors on end (i.e. at right angles to the PCB) - rather than laying them flat on the board - was a revolution. The space saving (i.e. reduced PCB real estate) was remarkable.

Richard