ECC86 Valve Radio

Actually, the age of valves is already past — but valves just refuse to go away! There’s many a valve radio still in use, and there are many valves lying in the ‘junk box’ waiting to be rediscovered. If only we could do without the high voltages! However, there is a valve that can manage with only 6 V — the ECC86. At the beginning of the 1960s, the electronics industry was faced with a problem. The transistor had just been born, so it was finally possible to build car radios without vibrators and large transformers. However, the cut-off frequencies were still too low to allow usable VHF mixer stages to be built using transistors. This meant that a valve had to be used in a transistor circuit.