NN251257
These activities don't require joining a club to do it - neither is it directly competitive. The idea is to take radio equipment to some or all of a particular class of location and to work a particular number of stations to claim that you have made that particular location "active".
In that chap's case he was doing hills known as Marylins (smaller than Monros) and needed four contacts. They do it with grid squares, hills, islands. Could do it with supermarket car parks even! The people who keep the records often set a particular date in the year for activity so there can be many operators all out at same time. see
http://www.rsgbiota.org/ as an example.
In a similar vein, there are pre-arranged one and two day radio contests where fixed stations collect contacts with as many and as far flung stations as possible. Taking a Land Rover up a suitable hill for one of these contests can make you very popular, as contest stations in south england get lots of points fo the distance and the rarity of the grid square.
