[eternityforest]

I very much agree we could do better than ham for emergencies... But I don't expect an emergency hotline operator to be able to actually help anyone, that's not their job.

I think we should go even further though, and make half of 70cm into ISM band with duty cycle limits, no license, commercial use allowed. Or maybe allow commercial use, but only with open protocols, so you can make an encrypted business radio, but only if you let others make a compatible one.

Then hams could talk to their non ham friends. Getting a license isn't trivial if you're not already an embedded dev, and it's even more of a hassle now that it costs money.

Being able to give someone a $20 radio that they could just use would be awesome. I don't think spectrum crowding is as much of an issue since people use wifi and 5g if possible for everything, aside from ultra slow long range stuff where everything uses lots of airtime.