lmonsanto,

The quality of the top brands is all pretty good. The biggest difference for me is the user interface.

I started out with all Yaesu gear. Yaesu is very cool and sexy. Unfortunately, I quickly tired of the user interfaces. I didn't find them to be very intuitive. My memory sucks and I didn’t want to have the owners manual tethered to my wrist just to operate it. Over time I replaced everything with Icom gear. Overall it was just simpler and more intuitive for me to use. I was much happier. My weird observation: The Yaesu gear seems to cater more to an "eastern" mind. The Icom gear seems to cater more to a "western" mind. (Whatever that means). I have very little experience with Kenwood gear. When I was looking at HF gear I read some reviews complaining about the user interface on the Kenwoods.(maybe a southern mind?) I never pursued further.

I found that I could run the Icom gear without much help from the manual. The Yaesu gear was always more confusing to me. My Yaesu HT had the volume or the squelch (there goes my memory again) as a menu item. D’oh! What were they thinking? My current Icom HT has volume and squelch on a knob. As it should be. I don’t want to have to execute a string of button presses to make a simple adjustment like volume or squelch.

In ham radio circles there seem to be plenty of “function” geeks. Their philosophy: A radio can never do too much. A radio can never be too complicated. “Just give me another bell, whistle, gee-gaw, or festoon and I don’t care how far its capabilities are buried in treacherous menus with button pushes requiring both hands and one foot”. Personally, I place a higher value on simplicity and reliability. (I’m so analog).

If you are a member of the ARRL you can go to their web site for some quality reviews.
http://www.arrl.org/

Also check out http://www.eham.net/

My advice: Find a well stocked ham radio store and play with the gear first. My guess is after a bit of playing around you'll have your answer. If you can operate it the first time without looking at the manual you’ve got a winner.

Regarding NERT. Make sure they actually have a use for you. Years ago our neighborhood began organizing and training for NERT. I was the Comm guy. I attended a local ARES/RACES meeting to find out how NERT would coordinate them. (It seems I was the first one to bother to do this) There was no procedures in place to communicate with NERT and no plans to change it. I called the county (Promoters of NERT). Same story. No procedures in place for the NERT to communicate with anyone outside the neighborhood. Within the neighborhood you are probably better off with FRS radios. Here, NERT is a great plan with no procedures to pass along critical communications. Our NERT pretty much fell apart after that.

Congratulations on your ticket!

Good luck, TR