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I've had my Extra class for the last 22 years. 20 years as advanced before that. Last year I finally purchased a Yaesu FT991A. It's plenty of radio for what I want to do. For many years I ran a Yaesu FT221 and had it hooked up to the packet radio gear in San Diego. When I moved to Pocatello, the ham community was much smaller. Mostly 2m radios on the mountain tops. One has a 10m FM link. Very little "450" activity. Quite a few towers with HF antennas in town. No DMR on 2m/450. The odd thing is there are some digital emergency data networks. AREDN. Some of the locals have nodes built for AREDN ops. I have a SignalLink USB that is going to get wiring up for FT8 at some point. Lots of deferred ham activity awaiting in retirement.

After building up some DMR rigs (CS800D), I'm annoyed at being tethered to a very manual configuration process on my desktop PC that needs to be uploaded/downloaded to the radios. The Yaesu digital modes with C4FM are very easy to configure from the front panel "on the fly". I did buy the software to program the FT991A. Could not be easier. Go to an online database, select the area and bands you want. A big CSV spreadsheet is generated. Cut and paste into the radio config, upload. Voila!

I manage a few DMR repeaters and a few GMRS repeaters.

All have Internet access, local PC's and full installs of the management software for those repeaters, behind firewalls. I can manage them all, upload new config's to the repeaters, reboot them and have them back on air with their new configs in minutes.

I'm a General Class Ham and honestly, my favorite of late is GMRS. We have a VERY active local community, far surpassing anything on DMR and 2m/70cm repeaters.

We're also investing heavily in solar and battery backup via solar charging so we can be off-grid for up to a week in the event of power disruption (which has happened in the more rural parts of HELLINOIS.)