Another great club night last night (4th April 2023), Ted MW6ADF put a home made 4mtr aerial up and everyone had a good 4mtr chat with Vince and others. Vince even got Keiran in the Wirral.
The 4m (70 MHz) band is an amateur radio band within the lower part of the very high frequency band.
Only a few countries within and outside of Europe have allocated the band for amateur radio use, this means that commercially available 4m equipment is limited when compared to 2m and 70cm radio equipment.
Before World War 2, British community radio stations had been allocated a band at 56 MHz. At the end of the war they were moved to the 5m band (58.5–60 MHz) . This frequency was then allocated to the BBC for television broadcasting in 1949 and the band was lost to community radio stations.
In 1956, after several years of lobbying by the RSGB, the 4-metre band was allocated to British community radio stations as a replacement for the old 5-metre band allocation. For many years the 4-metre band was only 200 kHz wide, from 70.2 to 70.4 MHz; it was later extended to 70.025–70.7 MHz and then eventually was extended to 70.0–70.5 MHz
In March 1993 the Amateur Radio Service the DSI management team recommended (among other things) that 70 MHz be considered as an amateur band and it has been in use by UK amateurs since then.