Fordwillman,

To be more precise, with a technician license you will be able to use all the available Ham frequencies in VHF and UHF. You will still need a license to operate on GMRS, which is likely where most of the traffic is going to be locally.

In my experience, Ham VHF (2 meters) is the most populated band for local traffic and has the greatest number of available repeaters for a given area. This is in my mostly rural area back home, and I am sure for more metropolitan areas, other bands, UHF especially, will see more use.

In comparison to Ham use, I would estimate GMRS/FRS to have roughly ten to 30 times more users for a given area. If GMRS repeaters are operating, expect the usage to be on the higher end of that estimate.

It used to be that Ham repeater owners were about the only ones who equipped their sites with alternative power in the event of utility failure. Over the last decade I've seen many more GMRS and commercial repeaters go to photovoltaic as either backup sources or as primary power. What used to be considered a luxury became somewhat a standard in a very short time.

We have a pretty good Ham network on two meters throughout the Pacific Northwest now. You'd be hard pressed to find a location anywhere in Washington state you can't get on an "Intertie" one way or another. There's even some redundancy built into the network, so if you do go Ham, chances are you can talk to other Hams across the region, wherever you may be. I don't know of any GMRS repeaters in a network, and likely the licensing restricts such operations. The nice thing about GMRS is they can be had for as little as $60 or so a piece, ready to go, with concurrent coverage on FRS operations as well. For a more complete description of what GMRS and FRS are, I suggest checking out the FCC website.

You can find some fairly nice and rugged used VHF radios for Ham radio. Some are progammable, some are fixed frequency. Being the tech that I am, I like a little bit of both, sometimes because I like to tinker and sometimes because I like the coolest latest gadgets out there. I've seen it all, from old tube jobs with dynomotors up to the latest programmable solid state smd "all bands" techno nightmares. My prediction is in 10 years we will all be talking to one another and share our MP3 files and such using unlicensed wrist mounted pda phones on SHF frequency bands talking to network nodes on a thousand low orbit satellites circling the globe.

Anyone wanna bet against that?