I joined Mid-Herts RAYNET at the start of 2008, and am enjoying it immensely. It's great to do something serious and useful with one of my hobbies, for a change!   Any other UK amateurs thinking of expanding their participation in the hobby, search the web for RAYNET and have a look round the various groups' web sites - there is very likely one that covers where you are.

I use APRS quite often when I'm on the road (especially when going to and from radio rallies, RAYNET events and so on), and you can see where I've been by looking up G1BYY-7 on the APRS-IS servers.

Early in 2009 I bought Surrey RAYNET's converted ambulance radio vehicle, for use by myself and Mid-Herts RAYNET as a control vehicle, as a talkthrough (relay) station, or just as an ordinary operating point with more of the comforts of home than usual! I've changed a few things to suit me, and it's proved to be very useful indeed on the couple of a dozen times I've used it so far. It's called Mercury (Mobile Emergency Radio Communications Unit, RaYnet) or The Wheeled Messenger (someone also suggested "The Hambulance")

The photo below shows it on duty as the control station at a charity walk not long after I got it.  There's seating inside for two or three operators at the workbench, and two or three other people can rest in comfort.  It has basic cooking facilities - no more thermos-flasks for me, I can have fresh coffee!  It has proved very popular with other operators and marshalls as a place to sit down for a rest with a cup of tea.

My next job will be to improve the five whip antennas, not really visible in the photo, which are used while mobile, and for different bands from the 6m/2m/70cms that the White Stick handles.  Their groundplanes are pretty ropey so I need to get a decent area of copper into the roof space. I've done one side (putting a 300mm square of copper under each antenna and linking them with 50mm copper strap) but it's a very fiddly, time-consuming job, so the other side will get done when I get time...

(Spring 2015) I've been granted an NoV to set up a fill-in APRS digipeater, callsign MB7UPS - "PS" = Park Street, the village I live in.   The idea to cover the parts of the M1 and M25 near here which tend to be out of range of the usual wide-coverage digipeaters for mobile stations - I'm almost exactly equidistant from MB7UJ (Bracknell) and MB7PI (Barkway).  Now I just need to build and install it!