I'm also a ham radio operator and the new repeaters are going digital which are slowly replacing the analog repeaters and using less bandwidth and not needing to use high power either. Hams have lots of modes which are used and lots of hams use digital over the air waves and the 2 meters and 420 - 450 band are used a lot now than it ever was. The hams also have the new digital repeaters for the 1.2 GHz band also. The digital repeaters are called D-star. What happen in New Orleans the 2 meters and the 420-450 band was used quite a lot when helping those in need. The reason why the two different bands were used was that the 2 meter signal traveled further distance and the 420-450 signal travel in shorter distances and is line of sight usage and at times was used when the distance was short and low power was used on the 420-450 band when talking to others in nearby streets. I could go on with more info, but I will save it in my letter to the Whitehouse.

I find that the Company that posted the notice is also in violation of the GPL License as they say on their web site they use open source and close it and only open some to only third party. It's clearly written that any open source modification are to be distributed back to the community and from the Companies web site, thats not whats happening.