Two of my opening questions were:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Synchrodyne
Did D&W start in the solid-state era, or did it have earlier activities with valve-based FM front ends?
What other radio/audio assemblies, if any, did D&W build?
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The answer to the first question is given by this advertisement from Practical Wireless (PW) 1966 May:
Similar advertisements ran through to 1969, but apparently not beyond.
Thus, D&W was active in the valve era,
That the advertised assembly was an FM front end (of the single-valve type) with an attached AM two-gang tuning capacitor shows that the D&W product line extended at least a little beyond FM-only front ends.
I’d guess that Haverson Surplus had acquired remaining stock of D&W valved FM front ends following the change to the solid-state type by D&W’s customers.
The Haverson description “beautifully designed and precision engineered by Dormer & Wadsworth” to some extent was probably marketing speak “purple prose”, but suggests that they might have been better than comparable run-of-the-mill units aimed more at the setmaker market.
Radford might have been a user of D&W valved FM front end. Its FMT1 model is known to have had a separate tuning head of the one-valve (ECC85) type, and it is almost certain that this would have been a proprietary unit. It does seem a little odd that a single-valve FM front end – essentially a lowest common denominator type – would have been used in a high-performance tuner that had a four-stage IF strip and a wideband ratio detector, but that may have reflected the non-availability of higher-performance units from third-party sources. Those UK FM tuner makers who used two-valve front ends probably “rolled their own”, and in many cases integrated them into the chassis rather than mounting them as a separate screened unit. (Although the Dynatron FE2 (used in the T10A and I think the T11) was a two-valve separate unit.) Of the UK-made single-valve units available to Radford, the D&W may have been seen as the best of the bunch.
Be that as it may, it does appear that with the arrival of the solid-state era, D&W took the opportunity to rise above the standard performance level, with 4-gang models and early adoption of the dual-gate mosfet. (Whether it ever got to 6-gang models with 2 RF stages, as did the Japanese suppliers and Ambit in the UK is unknown).
Cheers,