Recently, I have been tinkering with APRS and packet radio. It seems a bit weird to go back in time, fooling with 19200 baud rates while I work I deal with 100 megabyte internet circuits. Technology has improved over the years when packet radio was first introduced.
There is some cool stuff you can do with packet radio and APRS that I am interested in.
Including tracking the location of something using a GPS, a TNC, and a radio. This combination transmits its GPS coordinates location via the ham radio that you can recieve and display on a laptop computer with another TNC, radio, and a laptop. With some special software, you can get a map showing you where your device is. Works good when you need to track where someone is.
The other cool thing you can do that I am interested in is report weather data and other telemetry data. For example, voltage of a solar system at a remote site. Temperature, relay status, etc... I think you can report just about any data you can get out of a serial port over radio.
For equipment, I ended up purchasing a TinyTrak4 from Byonics. I was trying to keep it low budget and the Kantronics TNC's were running about $80 on Ebay. I went with the TinyTrak because it will do the GPS tracking, and you can simply re-program it to work as a KISS TNC, as well as a couple other functions. I am very frugal, always looking to get the most bank for my buck.
I purchased a Motorola Maxtrac VHF model, since I had so much luck with them when I built my GMRS repeater. They are a pain to program with DOS, but once they work, they work and if you shop around you can pick them up cheap in Ebay ($30 or so)