As part of my Search and Rescue training they encourage you to get a HAM amateur radio license. Last weekend at SAR (Search and Rescue) City – explained here, I took the Technician class test and am now officially licensed by the FCC as KI6MDR. The idea is, that other than regular communications, if there is a large scale disaster (I live in SoCal so read that as “earthquake”) we can all still all communicate. I picked up a nice little handheld unit, the Yaesu VX-7R to start. See where it goes from there.