As part of a plan to attract more people to amateur radio, I designed a "flash" activity where anyone with a personal mobile radio (PMR 446) handset could participate; as you know, anyone can use this band under certain conditions (500 mW, unmodified handheld with non-detachable antenna). After announcing my activity to amateur radio operators in the area and other friends, and after getting sufficient positive responses, on Saturday February 20, 2021, I climbed up (again, yes, we're still COVID-locked inside our municipalities) to Serra Mitjana (SOTA reference EA5/AT-099, locator IM98qj81) with a few "legal" PMR handsets, some very old. I finally only used the Cobra MicroTalk MT600 on the left.
I arrived at the summit around 0845Z (in the picture, the peak is the one on the left). It was foggy and the fog lifted only when I was about to leave.
I told everyone that I would be on channel 5, and started contacting people. After about 2 h on channel 5 and 6, I logged 15 contacts, all of them line-of-sight if I am not mistaken. No tropospheric ducting (although there was a bit of it, as I could clearly hear operators from Eivissa, 180 km away, on the 2-metre band). Of these, only 4 were "legal", in the sense that were done between two PMR-complying handsets in hand, but maybe three more were actually very close to legal. Of those four "legal" contacts, two were with people holding an amateur radio licence. The "not-so-legal" contacts were with stations with roof antennas or bigger powers. The farthest "legal" contact was 18 km away, and the distance doubled for the "not-so-legal".
Serra Mitjana is inside the limits of Alacant, a city with about 330,000 inhabitants; here is a picture I took weeks ago from the summit on a sunny day.
This that many other people using PMR handsets were in range: children (at least two groups), employees of a nursing home (with whom I negotiated moving to Channel 6), a sports store, etc. This made contacts difficult sometimes. Maybe they had CTCSS or DCS tones on and could not hear me.
As I promised, I will prepare a diploma for everyone who participated, in two categories: "restricted" and "unrestricted".
When I arrived back at the car (see picture from where I parked it) I decided I will call this "I Diploma PMR Serra Mitjana d'Alacant". Maybe there will be a "II Diploma".
The take-home message? There is a lot of fun to be had by radio-oriented "ordinary" people with very cheap, easily available, off-the-shelf handsets, and there is a chance that this may get them interested in amateur radio. Having said that, I must confess that I had all PMR 446 sets at home for more than a decade, and it was not until my son got a Baofeng UV-5R and I found out that it could work ham bands that I decided that, hey, I could get a licence, and I did (and my son did too). I will think of a plan.
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