Name/Title
Burndept BE470 personal radio c1975Entry/Object ID
2336Description
Burndept BE470 UHF personal radio, with blue plastic case, metal volume and channel buttons, yellow plastic transmitter button and fixed short aerial. Maker's mark "Burndept" on plate together with hand written serial number "58401". Also marked on tape at bottom handwritten "S3" with "S3" also scratched onto opposite side body.Use
For a police officer to use to both receive and transmit messagesContext
In the late 1960s the Home Office successfully completed the national rollout of police personal radios, so that for the first time all British police officers, especially those on foot patrol, had access to personal radio communication. At the time the standard Home Office approved radio was the Pye Pocketfone, which gave years of good service, including within the pre 1968 Sussex police forces and the newly formed Sussex Constabulary.
By the 1970s the Home Office was looking for a replacement for the Pocketfone and adopted the Burndept BE470. This model had a number of advantages over the Pye model. It consisted of a single transmitter and receiver unit and had up to three different channels. Though also made of plastic, it was more robust than the Pye, and being a single unit was easier to carry, usually either in a neck harness or clipped to the inside of a tunic.
Despite the unusual name "Burndept" was a British company established in 1922 from Burnham and Co.'s wireless department.
Though this particular example is not from Sussex Police, identical models were in use within the Force from 1974/1975 onwards as they began to replace the older Pocketfones. Like the Pye, these radios also gave years of good service, until they in turn were replaced by the Motorola HT600E as the Home Office standard police radio in the mid 1980s. Even after replacement these models continued to be used by police training centres and local force training departments into the 1990s.