For grins, yesterday afternoon I dug most of the parts out of my junk box to build a simple version of the Li'l 7. I do not have the proper oscillator coil, but found small antenna coil (likely out of a junked AM radio) that had 2 separate windings. The windings both had fairly low resistance (under 10 ohms), but I decided to give it a try. I did not use a power transformer for isolation, but made sure that ground on the board was always cold. I could not find a 1 meg pot, so I substituted a 1.2 meg resistor to ground at the input (pin 5).
Since the coil was not identified in any way, I connected the lower resistance winding (untuned) to the plate (pin 3) and B+ and used the higher resistance winding (tuned with a 270pf cap) in the feedback circuit (pin 4 and ground). A 6.3 VAC 60Hz "signal" from a bench power supply was connected to the input (pin 5) and ground.
I had to reverse the two leads in the feedback circuit to get oscillation, but when I did, I was able to find a loud buzz with a portable radio very near the transmitter. Since my "oscillator coil" does not have an adjustable slug for tuning, I merely scanned the band with the portable radio... found the buzz "signal" at about 700kHz. The range was only about 5 feet with no antenna connected to the transmitter.
Now the "sorta" part... when the signal was removed, it appeared that the transmitter stopped transmitting! In fact, there seemed to be a threshold... if the signal was reduced below a certain point oscillation stopped. I suspect that a real audio signal would be transmitted, but with much distortion, as bob91343 suggested.
Perhaps with the correct oscillator coil, the circuit *might* work ok, I don't know... today if I get a chance, I will try to "bias up" the G2 connection to a positive source to see if I can get undistorted modulation. As can be seen in the 'scope photo, alternate parts of the 60Hz test signal (likely the negative portions) are missing from the modulated output of the transmitter.
jr