Hi Bob, nice to see someone still has an interest in this stuff. I too grew up with it, worked on it and still tinker with the stuff. I finished restoring my old Austin last year and the Echo radio was one of the last things on my list. It is a large valve unit which lives in a compartment under the bonnet, the mechanical control box which sits on the facia panel is connected to the control shafts of the set by way of flexible drive couplings.
Apart from the odd valve which was gassed, my main problems were with the power supply unit, a seperate item bolted to the back of the set. It housed an HT generator and used the old method of switching the step up transformer buy the use of a vibrator pack. The main problem appeared to be burnt contacts in the vibrator itself, this was due to capacitor failure. Once replaced and cleaned out she was up and running again. Its a strange set in many ways and i suspect it was originally designed as a piece of WW2 equipment as it has one mw band , four preset frequencies and five sw bands running up to 18Mhz!!
The wretched thing has failed again and it is my belief that a valve has given up the ghost. It is an absolute pain to remove the set from the car so I've put it off for the moment but I hate driving the old girl around knowing something onboard is not functioning.
I have a few other sets kicking around, a couple of domestic receivers and and some old military sets too. One of these sets is an old Air Ministery rx, The model number escapes me and it's buried under tons of stuff in the loft ,but like yours, that is a re-gen set and utilises old four pin triode valves. It does still work and is amazingly sensitive AND selective when you crank up the regen contrrol. Superhets are wonderful but these old sets have so much going for them and are still a source of fascination.
Just for fun, I occasionally dig out the old crystal set I built for my son many years back, hook it up make sure it's all working, fiddle with it and put it away again!
Don't think I'll ever grow up .
