In 1924, Harold Pye, the son of the founder, and Edward Appleton, his former tutor at St John's College, Cambridge, designed a new series of receivers which proved even more saleable.

When the BBC started to explore television broadcasting, Pye found that the closest of their East Anglian offices was 25 miles outside the estimated effective 25-mile radius of the Alexandra Palace transmitter.

Stanley was fascinated by the new technology and on his instructions the company built a high gain receiver that could pick up these transmissions.

[3] This company grew to become the leading UK producer of mobile radio equipment for commercial, business, industrial, police and government purposes.

The Pye PC60 was eventually replaced by the EMI 2001 on BBC outside broadcasts but, during its lifespan, it was used on numerous high-profile productions including Wimbledon tennis and Open golf.

[8] Products such as these reversed the decline but the arrival of Japanese competition reduced demand to a level that threatened the viability of the manufacturing plants.

In 1960, Pye merged with its rival EKCO to form British Electronic Industries Ltd,[9] with C. O. Stanley as chairman and E. K. Cole as vice-chairman.

The Minister of Technology Tony Benn determined that a complete sale would create a de facto monopoly so he permitted the transfer of only a 60% shareholding, with an undertaking that the Lowestoft factory would continue to manufacture televisions.

During this transition, television receivers in the UK had to handle both the VHF and UHF wavebands, which added to the cost of producing the sets.

The resulting high price and low coverage areas of the new technology delayed consumer adoption further: it wasn't until 1977 that the number of colour licences sold outnumbered those of black and white.

Pye found themselves with high stocks and low cash flow at a time of poor industrial relations, a low-growth economy and limited scope for reducing costs.

The Lowestoft factory was subsequently sold to Sanyo and Philips moved the manufacture of Pye televisions to Singapore.

[citation needed] In 1979 Pye were implicated in an episode of Granada's World in Action in relation to the sale of UHF and VHF radios as well as telephone intercept equipment which was used by the Ugandan Public Safety Unit, the secret police of Idi Amin's rule responsible for killing perhaps several hundred thousand Ugandans.

[12] The Pye brand enjoyed a short-lived renaissance in audio equipment (known as music centres) during the 1970s, and in the late 1980s with televisions.