I'm a newly licensed Ham, got my Technician's ticket last year in fact.

I've gotten pretty involved with a local ARES group that works with area hospitals, have worked one "incident" and a couple of non-emergency events with a couple more coming up.

What I've seen is that there seems to be a moving away from using what for lack of a better term, the old fashioned radio gear and methods towards some of the newer digital stuff like DStar. I think that's frankly, a bad idea, here's why. In the case of a serious public emergency event, one in which power is lost in particular, those cell towers that folks have gotten so dependent on are either not going to be working or they'll be so overloaded as to be useless, I'm thinking of things like earthquakes and other natural disasters here. A system like DStar without the use of the net is just a really expensive radio with very limited text capability that requires the use of a laptop in order to get full functionality. That means adding another expensive, power using piece of equipment to the the mix. Which is the reverse of what one wants in an emergency, in my opinion.

In my limited experience responding to communications emergencies what was needed was basic, voice communications between multiple points with a minimum of equipment and fuss. That can be easily set up with some really easy to use Ham radios. The problems I see with focusing on the more esoteric systems is that they're expensive, harder to learn to use and frankly, have more capability than needed for emergency use. I don't need to be able to send a text message halfway around the world at G3 speeds if there's a wildfire burning near me in Los Angeles county but I might need to be able to send a message from a hospital that's lost their power and phone lines due to that same fire as happened just a few months ago here in Los Angeles county. When it comes to the more mundane uses, do I really need a $1000 handheld radio hooked up to a computer which in turn is connected wirelessly to the net thru a server in another state to let race control know that the last runner has passed thru my checkpoint, as I did just last month at a local trail race.

The problem is that there is an attitude amongst a lot of the well, lets call them the more senior Ham operators out there that if you didn't get your license by going to the FCC office and can't tap out CW at 30+ wpm that you are somehow unworthy of using a Ham radio. That attitude filters down and can be extremely discouraging to those newbies who are interested in learning more about Ham radio. There's a very real "if you don't know, I'm not gonna tell you" attitude in some people, luckily there are more Hams that are ready and willing to be of help to both the new folks as well as the general public. If there wasn't I never would gotten my license in the first place.