IK0WRB radio amateur site

Note: to use these radios you must send a written declaration to the Ministry of Communications and pay an annual tax of € 12, that lets you have and use up to 15 PMR-446 radios. If the Ministry will not answer, you are authorized to use them.
Modulation is FM and the maximum output power is 500 mW. Antenna must be attached to the handheld and not changeable. To limit interferences you can use CTCSS or DCS tones.
Since this is a common CEPT standard, these radios are freely usable in many European countries (in most of them - not in Italy - even without declaration and tax). So, they can be very useful when traveling throughout Europe.

In most voice communication devices, audio frequencies lower than 300 Hz are filtered out, both in the transmitter and the receiver. This frequency space is used to send audio tones that are not heard but useful to code information. If you select a sub-audio tone in your PMR-446 radio, you will ear only the trasmitters that have set up exactly the same tone, and vice-versa. This way you will not ear transmissions you are not interested to.
But be careful: this is not a voice coding system! If someome listen to a particular channel without using tones, he will ear everything on that channel, including your tone-coded emissions. This is a protection for the receiver, not for the trasmitting side.