It will also work if there's a (nearly?) statewide internet/cellphone/landline outage due to natural disasters. The $30 radio would too (if you can get in to an APRS repeater, or the space station, or whatever), but i'd rather have HF in an emergency of that scale, and VHF/UHF for day-to-day use. I forget the (VHF) APRS frequency offhand but you can find out if there's a digipeater or even a regular store and evenutally forward repeater in your area by tuning to that frequency and see if you hear the same station replying whenever any other station sends a message - it's usually pretty obvious.
also https://aprs.fi/ if anyone wants to see what else it can do. I built a slack bot after map reducing all of the weather nodes aprs.fi knows about to "least distance from zip and/or city/state", then hitting the public web and beautiful souping the weather information from aprs.fi for that particular weather station.
Do you receive messages back too?
Where do you check the ISS schedule?
I am interested in amateur radio bit have almost zero experience. I do have a cheap SDR and recently bought a handheld quansheng radio.
All I've done with thr SDR is monitor airplane info and all I've really done with the handheld is listen to the pilots approach broadcasts.
I interact with the space station using "APRS", a digital mode that is the equivalent of sending short text messages. It's fun to see how many thousands of miles a message can go with just a $30 handheld radio and $150 billion space station 250 miles above the earth.
This is where emergency backup communications sneaks in as the other interesting part of the hobby... It's fun to experiment with the scenario of being in the middle of nowhere with no phone signal and still being able to bounce a signal off a satellite (or space station) to get a message out. Of course, that's extremely unlikely to really work well in a real emergency, and less magical if it's a built-in feature of common mobile phones, but it's fun to practice gaming out those scenarios anyway.