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Etronic Etronic was a brand name used by Hale Electric Ltd, who were based
in West Ealing, London. They started building radios using the brand name
Etronic in the 1940's, and on occasion also marketed sets bearing other brand
names such as Midgetronic. It has to be said that they never really produced
anything of note for the classic wireless collector, their products could
perhaps be described as competent rather than innovative. Their best receivers
tend to be their earliest, perhaps one of the most common is the RA640, a set
housed in a wooden cabinet with 4 valves plus rectifier plus Y63 tuning
indicator. At that time they also made a quite respectable radiogram, but as
time progressed their products became more and more bland. The receiver shown is
the ETD4310 I believe. This receiver features in my collection for no other
reason than its rather impressive substantial bakelite cabinet. It is an accumulator and HT battery set, with 3
octal valves. It is rather rare, I
have only heard of a couple of others. The cabinet is the exact same size as the
(more common) mains RA640 which was housed in a wooden cabinet, in fact the chassis's could be
directly swapped. (In fact when I obtained my example, it came together with an RA640,
subsequently disposed of). When I acquired my set it was already converted to
operate from the mains using a "Convette" HT and LT battery eliminator, as can be
seen in the photograph. It is for that reason that I am not 100% confident of
the model number. The previous owner cut an aperture in the card back panel so
that the eliminator could be viewed, and the cut position was where the model
number information was. Continue to Ferguson © COPYRIGHT RETAINED ON ALL TEXT AND PICTURES ON THIS SITE.
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You
will notice that unlike most of the bakelite radios featured on this site, the
cabinet of this set has not be cleaned. This is simply because it is a time
consuming one to do. Aside from the size, all those slats in front of the
loudspeaker, plus those vertical ribs at the sides of the cabinet take an age to
polish with cotton buds - the only thing worse than a dirty bakelite cabinet is
a half-cleaned bakelite cabinet! This set (along with the RA640) is notable for
being one of the very few sets where the tuning scale is positioned on the left
of the cabinet and the speaker on the right. The company logo screen printed on
the glass is also un-missable, they obviously didn't subscribe to the "less
is more" theory! Notice the break in the white border line at the top of
the tuning scale? That's because Etronic used the same tuning glass for this set
as the mains powered RA640, and the magic eye tuning indicator occupied that
position.