--further to my last and for interest!
It took some finding but finally located a Pilot radio table model in wood veneer hopefully for the NBT butty (Brighton).
Dating from the late 1930/40's period it looks the part (see Painted boats movie) and is reasonably small in size
given the constraints of a working boat cabin. It operates satisfactorily on internal ferrite rod and wire aerials
and has a Celestion 8 "elliptical speaker plus a tone control----.
However it is in fact a wolf in sheep's clothing since the original (valved) interior has been removed and a 1970's
Roberts radio transistorised chassis (pcb) expertly installed instead (not by me!) Thus a VHF fm capability as well as
medium wave! The new chassis only requires a 9v supply so it has proved relatively easy to convert to 12v dc /cigar lighter operation with a PP9 battery option if it ever has to work on the bank.
One problem of course on medium wave is that the tuning scale legend is well out of date being engraved with Radio Hilversum, Athlone, Luxembourg ,Toulouse etc. However on Vhf, since the BBC channel bands are grouped, tuning is easy
with the help of a simple chart.
Not sure what the reaction of trust members will be to this innovation. The purists might say that boat people historically were too poor to ever afford domestic radio although both Tom Rolt in 1939 and |David Blagrove in 1960 mention their use on the cut---.
lawrie (nbt member)
lawrie (