The combination of both a ham and a GMRS license is actually pretty nice.
I got my General class license for ham a couple of years ago, and it's a fun hobby that does lend itself to disaster preparedness. My sub-$1000, battery-powered HF setup easily allows me to reach out and make contact across most of North America, and I frequently make contacts in Japan, South Korea, and eastern Russia. And with my cheap Baofeng and AnyTone radios I can tap into the awesome regional repeater network we have here in the Puget Sound.
However, with those radios I can only talk with other hams. In contrast, my $75 for 10 years GRMS license allows my entire family (the rest of which are not licensed hams) to talk on GRMS channels at up to 50 watts, instead of the 2 watt max you have with FRS. And here in Seattle we get access to some awesome GMRS repeaters, so we can basically communicate with each other anywhere across the city.
Do you have any specific advise for getting setup in the Puget Sound with GMRS (as I suppose the HAM portion is universal) ? Like OP I'm also interested in dabbling in this stuff.
Have you by any chance documented how you did this, or could you link me to where you learned how to set this up? This is actually one of the projects I puttered on for a long time with one of my RPis (NMEA-2000 to SignalK) but abandoned because I had too many moving parts.
Been meaning to blog about it, but not got around to it yet. Essentially it's just a (bunch of) USB-serial converters and the Seatalk data is converted by a Raymarine E85001. If you have N2k, you need a different converter, e.g. Actisense or better yet, a translator to NMEA0183, which is the de-facto standard for NMEA over TCP/IP.
Chris Metcalf here, Developer Evangelist from Socrata (http://dev.socrata.com), the company that provides the platform that hosts the catalog and some of the open data APIs they're providing. I'm glad to answer whatever questions I can here.
We worked with a team from across NASA to build it, including the Ames Research Center and other groups.
At Socrata we work with all levels of governments, including cities, states, federal agencies, and even international governments around the world: http://www.socrata.com/customer-stories/
I got my General class license for ham a couple of years ago, and it's a fun hobby that does lend itself to disaster preparedness. My sub-$1000, battery-powered HF setup easily allows me to reach out and make contact across most of North America, and I frequently make contacts in Japan, South Korea, and eastern Russia. And with my cheap Baofeng and AnyTone radios I can tap into the awesome regional repeater network we have here in the Puget Sound.
However, with those radios I can only talk with other hams. In contrast, my $75 for 10 years GRMS license allows my entire family (the rest of which are not licensed hams) to talk on GRMS channels at up to 50 watts, instead of the 2 watt max you have with FRS. And here in Seattle we get access to some awesome GMRS repeaters, so we can basically communicate with each other anywhere across the city.