PMR446

©Techno Tone

2006

PMR446

PMR446 is a licence pan-European licence exempt service which in the UK was seen as a replacement for SRBR. Being licence exempt, there are no specific licence conditions to adhere to, but the equipment used must comply with ETS 300 296.

The name PMR has been used traditionally by the RA to refer to a particular class of licence, that of Private Mobile Radio which was a licensed and paid for service under the now defunct RA.

PMR licences are no longer issued. Ofcom instead licence their business users under its successor which is titled PBR ( Private Business Radio) under the Ofcom regime.

In the States, there has, for some time, been made available the licence exempt FRS or Family Radio Service. The European PMR446 is similar to this and in a lot of instances our European handhelds are derived from the same handhelds, but in the US, they have 22 analogue channels, we have just eight.

Radios available for analogue PMR446 range from a pair of blister packed squawky talkies for around 30 Euros to models which are derived from professional UHF handhelds already in production.

The greatly more rugged and durable high end radios are much more suitable for day in day out use and are devised quite often from commercial grade equipment but in fact the cheaper models offer a substantially better bang for your buck. Thanks to the marvel of mass production and the burgeoning far Eastern manufacturing base, a pair of cheap handhelds can work surprisingly well when pitted against the higher priced models. I like to use a mixture of both, smaller more dispensable ones to give to the kids or when I'm not wanting to be constantly worrying about losing or damaging an expensive radio.

PMR446 radios are on the whole all interoperable at a basic level. Scrambling is allowed under this specification and you need to have a clutch of radios which share the same encryption protocols in this case.

Unnecessarily nasty PMR446 radios

There are only eight channels on PMR446 and in a high activity area, sooner or later you are bound to find that you are in range of another bunch of people using the same frequency channel.
Even UK CB/27/81 was limited to 40 channels and that got congested at times. The number of frequencies available to paying commercial PBR users is many hundred and as a result, those eight channels available in analogue PMR446 are arguably the most congested channels in the whole spectrum. It's absolutely essential to have subtone encoding/decoding on your radio if you are using it in an urban environment. Radios with CTCSS and or DCS don't even necessarily have to cost more.

PMR446 radios vary in their CTCSS implimentation. Some are able to be programmed to take a specific subtone frequency for each of the eight channels, whereas the better ones can take a different subtone or DCS code on a channel by channel basis. Some can scan and discover which subtone is in use which is great for setting up a bunch of radios to all achieve interusability.

PMR446 was officially extended in the UK on the 8^th December 2006 to include 446.1 to 446.2 MHz (an additional 100kHz) for digital use. The European approval dated from the beginning of 2006. This may ease congestion for non-casual users and offer a way out from the crowded 8 analogue frequencies.

PMR446

Unnecessarily nasty PMR446 radios

Links