Most people who prepare for emergencies agree that staying in touch matters. Far fewer have a plan that goes beyond a pair of walkie-talkies and the hope that the cell phone will work. If that describes your household, this page is an argument for changing it.
Why ordinary communications fail
Instant contact with anyone, anywhere, feels permanent. The systems behind it are more fragile than they look. Cell networks are built for normal traffic, not for a whole city calling at once, and they depend on grid power, backup batteries and generators at each tower, and fiber or microwave links behind them.
The pattern repeats in almost every large emergency, and even at crowded stadiums: calls fail to connect in either direction. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, networks in New York and Washington were overwhelmed. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 knocked out large numbers of towers through wind, flooding and backup batteries running flat. After the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, phone service in the area was badly congested for hours. Each was regional. A wider disaster would strain the system further.
Landlines
Traditional copper landlines once carried their own power and often kept working when the lights went out. Most homes now have phone service over cable or fiber, which needs power at the house and along the line, and few copper networks remain. In a long outage, a landline is unlikely to outlast the grid by much.
Walkie-talkies
Family Radio Service handhelds need no license and are handy for keeping a group together at a campsite or across a neighborhood. Their range is short, typically a mile or two in real conditions, and nowhere near enough to reach relatives in another town. The related General Mobile Radio Service allows more power and repeaters, and needs a license with no exam, but it is still a local service.
Satellite phones and messengers
Satellite phones work almost anywhere with a clear view of the sky, and recent smartphones can send emergency texts by satellite. Both are useful. But satellite phones are expensive to buy and to run, they need an unobstructed sky, so they struggle indoors and under heavy tree cover, and every one of these services depends on a company keeping its satellites running and your account active.
Amateur radio
That leaves one method that needs no commercial network at all and can reach across a town, a region or the world: amateur radio, better known as ham radio.
Hams run their stations from mains power, batteries, generators or solar panels, from home, from a car or from a hilltop. Their emergency role is formal. Organized groups such as the Amateur Radio Emergency Service and the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service support city, county and state emergency managers, and relief organizations use volunteer operators when normal circuits fail. The national association’s slogan, “When All Else Fails,” describes the purpose fairly.
“Amateur” says nothing about skill. It means the service is noncommercial: operators may not be paid for their transmissions or broadcast to the public for profit. Many amateurs are highly technical, and some of the best emergency communicators in the country are hams.
Strengths and weaknesses
The great strength of ham radio is reach. On the right frequencies at the right time, a modest station can talk across the street or across an ocean, with no tower, cable or provider in between.
The weaknesses are the license, which is required to transmit, and the learning curve. Using the radio well is a skill that takes practice and can keep growing for a lifetime.
Why bother with a license if the rules might not matter in a crisis?
This question comes up often. The answer is that amateur radio cannot simply be picked up and used when it is needed. Choosing a band, rigging an antenna, understanding how signals travel by ground wave, by skywave off the ionosphere, or by near-vertical skywave for regional coverage, and knowing how the time of day and solar activity change conditions: all of that is learned by doing it. Doing it legally before an emergency requires a license.
The rules do make room for communication by whatever means is at hand in a genuine emergency, when life or property is in immediate danger and normal channels are down. That provision is little help to someone who has never keyed a microphone. Most real emergencies are also local and short, a storm or a flood rather than the end of the world, and a licensed, practiced operator is useful in every one of them.
Getting licensed is easier than it used to be
A generation ago, every ham license required a test in Morse code. The Federal Communications Commission dropped that requirement for all license classes in February 2007. Morse is still used and still worth learning, but it is optional.
There are three license classes in the United States:
- Technician, the entry license. It gives full privileges on the VHF and UHF bands used for local and regional contact, often through repeaters, and limited privileges on the long-distance HF bands.
- General, which opens most of the HF bands used for regional and worldwide contact.
- Amateur Extra, which adds the remaining frequencies.
Each class has a multiple-choice written exam: 35 questions for Technician, 35 for General and 50 for Extra, with a pass mark of about 74 percent. The entire question pool for each exam, answers included, is published, so candidates know exactly what they could be asked. The pools are revised on a four-year cycle; the Technician pool was most recently replaced on July 1, 2026, so make sure your study material matches the date of your exam.
Some people study the pool until they know the answers and pass that way, and it is possible to pass Technician and General in a single sitting after a few days of focused study. Others prefer to learn the theory behind each question first, which makes the radio easier to use afterward. Free online practice sites draw questions from the official pools and track which topics you keep missing, and the national association publishes study guides for each class.
Where to take the exam
Exams are given by teams of volunteer examiners, usually through local radio clubs, and many teams now also run sessions online by video. The ARRL exam session search lists upcoming sessions by location and date, and a nearby club is also a good place to ask.
What it costs
Not much. Volunteer examiner teams charge a small session fee; under the ARRL’s program it is $15 in 2026, which covers one attempt at each exam element, and some other examiner groups charge less or nothing. After you pass, the FCC charges a separate $35 application fee, paid online within 10 days of receiving the application file number. A license is valid for 10 years and can be renewed.
You can take all three exams at one session if you like, but they must be passed in order, Technician before General and General before Extra.
A first station and emergency power
The usual first radio is a handheld that covers the two most common VHF and UHF bands. They are inexpensive, and with a local repeater a handheld can reach across a county. The small rubber antenna that comes with it is its weakest part; a longer whip, or an outdoor antenna on the house, extends range far more than extra transmitter power does. A mobile radio in the car or on a desk, run from 12 volts, is the next step, and it reaches a good deal farther.
For work when the grid is down, keep power in mind from the start. Spare handheld batteries, or a battery case that takes ordinary AA cells, keep a handheld going. A 12-volt battery with a small solar panel and a charge controller will run a mobile radio for days of light use. Test the whole setup on a quiet weekend rather than finding the gaps during a storm.
Getting on the air
Once the call sign arrives, use it. Buy or borrow a basic handheld or mobile radio, find the local repeaters, and join a club net where operators check in each week. Many clubs take part in an annual nationwide field exercise each June, setting up stations on emergency power in parks and fields, which is one of the best ways to learn how a station goes together away from the grid.
When the power is out and the phones are down, a charged battery, a length of wire for an antenna and a radio can still reach family and neighbors, and people far beyond them. That capability is worth building before it is needed.