Could a vintage 9 transistor AM/FM implement a phase-locked loop of some form?

Question

A side discussion around an answer to the question How many stations could one hear with an AM/FM radio in front of the ISS' cupola window? has arisen with regard to the possibility that a change in frequency of order 2.6 kHz would need someone to turn the knob of an FM broadcast receiver carefully to track it, or whether a rudimentary PLL or other circuit might have been able to allow reception.

The radio in question (shown below) had only 9 transistors, and covered both the AM and FM bands.

So there are really two parts to this question:

1. Could a 9 transistor AM/FM radio implement something that could be called a phase-locked loop?
2. Could a 9 transistor AM/FM radio provide good reception if the broadcast drifted by 2.6 kHz due to a doppler shift? (The receiver would be in low earth orbit, presumably intercepting a lobe or side-lobe of the transmitter.)

Answer 1

Maximum doppler of 2.5 kHz is only about 3% Modulation. As others have said, the radio's 110 MHz. local oscillator would drift at least that much - it would likely be a mechanically rotated variable capacitor resonating with a coil inductor.
Such a radio may include Automatic Frequency Control (AFC). A switch is often included to allow AFC to be disabled. The station is manually tuned by ear with AFC off, then AFC is enabled to help the local oscillator to track any drift. Doppler shift (very slow) would be regarded by the AFC circuitry as drift.

AFC is a proportional servo loop whose input comes from the radio's FM detector discriminator. Audio is also derived from this discriminator. A low-pass filter ensures that audio is eliminated from the AFC servo voltage that is sent back to the local oscillator. A 9-transistor radio could have an AFC circuit, since the low-pass filter might include only passive components.
The local oscillator accepts this near-DC voltage to control its frequency over a narrow range - not enough to swing its frequency to an adjacent channel.

Even without AFC, doppler shift would very slightly increase audio distortion, probably not even noticed, since discriminator bandwidth is larger than the selective intermediate-frequency amplifier bandwidth.

Answer 2

Could a 9 transistor AM/FM radio have something that could be called a phase-locked loop?

No, this kind of radio is far too simple in construction to contain a PLL. For a PLL-based synthesizer in a radio receiver a frequency divider is needed which can be programmed to different division ratios so that we can receive many channels. Such a frequency divider requires in the order of a hundred transistors or much more. So in any radio receiver containing a PLL you would find at least one IC containing many transistors.

I do not think the doppler shift will be any issue as 2.6 KHz is much less than the reception frequency shift you can expect from such a simple (non PLL) receiver. My guess is that temperature changes will cause more frequency offset change (in the receiver itself) than that 2.6 kHz.